"This record is incredibly passionate, and it's got incredible lyrics. I've since become friends with Wes [Eisold, frontman] and he's a great guy, a great writer and musician, but this record just holds so much weight in my youth, at a time when I was quite lost and hardcore really picked me up. They were emerging at that time and they're from Boston, which just seemed violent to me, and I needed that violence in my life. I stage dove to American Nightmare in Camden Underworld in 2003 and dislocated my arm, and when I saw them play it was something hard to ignore. They looked like mods, like they should have lived in Brighton in the 70s. It was so weird to see a dude in skinny jeans, DMs, and a Fred Perry shirt but screaming his guts out in North London, surrounded by kids in black hoodies, it was bizarre. I still have it in my workout playlist now and that's a good 15 years on. When I hear the song 'AM/PM' it makes me want to stage dive again, and I love that it can make me feel like that so late in the day."

"A film that seems absolutely tortured by J. C.’s two contradictory impulses: a desire to give the audience and funders what they want, and bitter disdain for the kind of violent, sexualized entertainment that would entail (Cosmo Vitelli vs. Mister Sophistication). I think this is why the gun and fight scenes are so illegible, so badly staged. And while there are bare breasts, they’re never sexy in any way. He can’t bring himself to give us the money shot. Because of this, I don’t know what to do with the film’s moments of pure pictorial beauty. Most of the time, you can barely see what’s going on, but then somebody turns on a light or opens the door, and the light itself is a shimmering, seductive presence. Is the ugliness the price we pay as an audience (or the technical precondition) to get those radiant images? Or is the pretty stuff a brief surrender, an embarrassing concession to the idea movies should be nice to look at? I think both. And it’s a personal question, because we light our films the same way."

"I think I'd been looking for something like this for ages; something sculpted, but that manages to encompass the violent and everything in between. What I want out of music is everything really, and The Pearl is that. It's quite a dark record in places. It's easy to dismiss it as New Age. I think we're quite lucky at this point in time that people are less concerned about genres than they used to be. Even prog rock is getting a proper analysis now. I finally got around to listening to early Genesis recently and found it wasn't as disgusting as I expected it to be. A lot of music gets dismissed because of how it's tagged. But The Pearl has escaped that really, because of Eno. I was lucky living in St Helens, because it can seem like a bit of a cultural desert, but there were a couple of good resources. There used to be a really good record shop in the market that sold mostly prog rock stuff, but lots of psychedelic stuff, some of Tim Buckley's early stuff and I picked up The Pearl from there. It's amazing."