"I just feel like that’s a movie that I saw when I was a kid, and you watch it over and over and over again, and you’re like, “Oh, Steve Martin’s doing bits, but they fit a story.” And it’s beautifully shot and directed by Carl Reiner, which some people don’t realize, and I just can’t think of a movie that informed my comedic personality more than The Jerk. It’s also a dumb character… it breaks all these stupid rules that Hollywood has for the sake of humor, and for the sake of jokes, and it’s a feel-good movie. Oh, man. I watch it over and over and over again. It’s got bits of Woody Allen’s kind of mysticalism, but it’s not. It’s jokey but the jokes don’t have punchlines. It’s like a Steve Martin album live, and they did a good job with making it a story. In a lot of ways you have no Borat without The Jerk, you have no anything, Lebowski; all those characters are Jerk-inspired. I play dumb quite a bit; I’ll say that right now. I don’t know if you call it a crutch, or what, but I tend to lean dumb… I don’t think I would have been able to get away with that had it not been for that movie."

"The next movie would probably be Young Frankenstein. I remember going to see that as a kid. Because I loved all the Universal horror films, but I had only seem them on TV, like on Creature Double Feature on Friday afternoons. By that point I loved Gene Wilder, because I made the connection like, “Oh, that guy was in Willy Wonka. Now he’s in Young Frankenstein.” So that movie blew me away. And even to this day, I watch it all the time. It’s such an incredible movie because it’s really, really funny, with such incredible performances, but it’s so beautifully made. Nobody would spend the time now to make a comedy that well. Visually and technically, it’s so incredible. It doesn’t date; it holds up. Peter Boyle’s perfect, and Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder, and everybody. It’s just an incredible movie. It really captured the feel of those Universal films, like Bride of Frankenstein, yet it is really funny. It’s something that almost never works. You know, kind of look at the Munsters on TV, and the Addams family, where you could get into it and they have the art direction there and everyone’s funny, but it almost never works. It’s almost always a disaster, and that film is just so perfect. I think the fact that people were brave enough back then to release black-and-white movies."

"Listening to this in Brazil a few years ago was a proper Eureka moment for me. We'd moved to the middle of nowhere for seven months, and I decided to properly have some time properly listening to music, so got a lot of stuff off Thom on a hard drive. I was really into Burial and that side of dubstep back then. Stuff that works perfectly underneath railway arches at 3am strangely enough didn't resonate on the edge of the rainforest, though. What did was Screamadelica. 

I'd first heard Loaded when I was studying at Manchester University in 1990. I remember it coming out after 'Fools Gold' and 'Hallelujah', and seeing Primal Scream on a double-header with Looper. I remember thinking, ah, this is good, a bit different for them, but they're jumping on the bandwagon, aren't they? Later, 'Don't Fight It Feel It' became the ultimate tune of that time for me. But away from that time, this album still stands alone. It's so colourful. It's like gospel dance music. It's got all the euphoria of house music, plus the community and love. It reminded me that that moment in culture wasn't just about the drugs – those drugs were just there to pierce the veil. Music held the ultimate power to bring people up. I want my music to have that joy, that light, that sense of possibility."