"This goes back a long time for me. This was a real defining record for Supergrass around '95 when we were first starting out. It was on the tour bus all the time and I remember our tour manager at the time really loving it. He'd wake us up every morning knocking on our door going, 'baby's on fire!', doing this mad Eno impression and that would always lift us up and make us laugh. There were so many lyrics that we'd sing at each other. I'd meet Danny and go, 'Cindy tells me…' It had this really long lasting effect on us. It's brilliant, just brilliant. It's Eno being kind of clever but dumb, sophisticated but raw and I think it's brilliant. I love his voice and the double-tracking on it and I think it ended up being quite an iconic sound. It's very unique. And for all of his technical ability, I love that he plays dumb on some of these tracks, you know, like on 'Needles In The Camel's Eye' and the guitars are big, filthy, dirty and horrible things. I love it. We almost did work with Brian Eno. We had a meeting with him in Paris before Diamond Hoo Ha and I can't remember exactly what happened but I think our timing schedules didn't work out. It was something frustrating that meant we couldn't work with him. It's weird one. It's kind of like, are they different Brian Enos? Is it a danger to confuse the Here Come The Warm Jets Brian Eno thinking that he was going to walk into a studio with us and create something that gives you that feeling because he's a different person now. I think he's amazing and he's proved to be still a musical force. An incredible guy and he was a really lovely chap when we met him."

"I love Power, Corruption & Lies. I also love Movement and I play it all the time, as it was the first album after Joy Division. It still has a bit of that Joy Division darkness, almost with a sense of defeat about it, which is kind of how I felt when I was a teenager in the late fucking '70s. But I think Power, Corruption, the record after it, there's more light in it. It's more joyous, it's more lyrically lighter. And I think Bernard Sumner found his own voice, loosened up and just became Bernard when he came out of Ian Curtis's shadow. This album is a huge inspiration and I was fascinated at the time by the way that New Order would take electronics and the sequencer sound, which I loved from Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love', and they took it and applied it to rock & roll. They first did this with 'Temptation', which was released before 'Blue Monday'. I was previously in a band on Factory called The Wake and we'd opened for New Order. I'd had a tape recorder and I'd recorded some of their shows. They were playing 'Temptation' live, long before it was released as a single. I was obsessed by the way they took that tut-tut-tutut-tut-tut-tut sequence inspired by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's arpeggio sound. To this day, that's still a big influence on Primal Scream. I'm just saying thank you to Bernard, Hooky, Stephen and Gill because I remember buying that record when it came out with a beautiful Peter Saville sleeve. The reason there's no writing on the album cover of Screamedelica is in total homage to Saville and Factory Records. A lot of our albums have no writing on the cover either. I mean, 'Age Of Consent': What. The. Fuck. Is. That? Playing with New Order back in the early '80s was like a fucking dream at the height of their fucking power!"

"It was 1966, my senior year of high school, and with one of my closest friends in tow I cut school and went into New York, to the Bleecker Street Cinema, to see a double bill of Breathless and 8 1/2. I had seen foreign films before, but nothing like these two. We loved Breathless. It was rebellious, anarchic, romantic, and the characters were so superkool we wanted them in our seventeen-year-old lives. But as much as Breathless moved and influenced me, 8 1/2 rocked my world. In the first five minutes, during Guido’s dream, I could feel my brain collapsing in on itself. The camera’s POV of Guido’s foot tethered to the ground as he floats high above the ocean, then suddenly falling only to awake with a hand grasping for consciousness, was deeply personal for me. I often wake from my nightmares in much the same way. Forty years later, in season one of Heroes, an episode called “6 Months Ago” afforded me the opportunity to re-create those very same shots. It was thrilling to use those same images in the service of a different story of my own creation. If forced to name my all-time favorite movie sequence, the childhood memory of “Asa Nisi Masa” would make the final four. It is cinema as magic. The way the mentalist grapples with the words Asa Nisi Masa, and we travel through Marcello Mastroianni’s mind and into a haunting memory of the past. His childhood is alive with mysticism, mischief, and a lost family’s love. Don’t get me started about the exquisite finale, with its parade of characters and clowns. Is Guido dead or not? I still haven’t decided. Leaving the Bleecker, my mind permanently blown, I thought that I would never understand this movie—and that is one of its strengths. After forty-two years and as many viewings, it reminds me of the best of Bob Dylan, the last line of “Frankie Lee & Judas Priest”: “Nothing is revealed.”"

"It was 1966, my senior year of high school, and with one of my closest friends in tow I cut school and went into New York, to the Bleecker Street Cinema, to see a double bill of Breathless and 8 1/2. I had seen foreign films before, but nothing like these two. We loved Breathless. It was rebellious, anarchic, romantic, and the characters were so superkool we wanted them in our seventeen-year-old lives. But as much as Breathless moved and influenced me, 8 1/2 rocked my world. In the first five minutes, during Guido’s dream, I could feel my brain collapsing in on itself. The camera’s POV of Guido’s foot tethered to the ground as he floats high above the ocean, then suddenly falling only to awake with a hand grasping for consciousness, was deeply personal for me. I often wake from my nightmares in much the same way. Forty years later, in season one of Heroes, an episode called “6 Months Ago” afforded me the opportunity to re-create those very same shots. It was thrilling to use those same images in the service of a different story of my own creation. If forced to name my all-time favorite movie sequence, the childhood memory of “Asa Nisi Masa” would make the final four. It is cinema as magic. The way the mentalist grapples with the words Asa Nisi Masa, and we travel through Marcello Mastroianni’s mind and into a haunting memory of the past. His childhood is alive with mysticism, mischief, and a lost family’s love. Don’t get me started about the exquisite finale, with its parade of characters and clowns. Is Guido dead or not? I still haven’t decided. Leaving the Bleecker, my mind permanently blown, I thought that I would never understand this movie—and that is one of its strengths. After forty-two years and as many viewings, it reminds me of the best of Bob Dylan, the last line of “Frankie Lee & Judas Priest”: “Nothing is revealed.”"

"It was a real wake-up call. Hip hop until 1984, 85 was fun but for the most part it was party music. Living outside New York we'd listen to WBLS and Kiss FM where they played a lot of hip hop and me and my friends liked it, but it was very lighthearted. The Fatboys are the perfect example, or the Treacherous Three, where they have disco basslines and this fun vocal. Then almost out of nowhere Public Enemy happened. Everything about it was different. The lyrics were different, Chuck D's vocal approach was different, the subject matter and the production, the Bomb Squad. I remember hearing it for the first time and thinking how did they do this, because they've basically made punk rock hip hop, the sounds they were using, the way they were distorting basslines, it was a lot of the same ways industrial records were being made but they were making hip hop. It was so revolutionary. You can refer to musical culture in New York as before and after Public Enemy, it changed the city. New York was so dangerous then, it had the highest murder count, people were getting stabbed and shot and the crack epidemic was decimating communities and people were dying of AIDS. You'd go out to nightclubs in the late 80s and you'd hear these apocalyptic Public Enemy songs that perfectly described the city that you lived in, but they were oddly celebratory and you could dance to them. For better or worse one of the reasons I've left New York is because the city I grew up with is still there, but it's become a much meaner, safer version of its former self. I still love New York, but it's become primarily the domain of hedge fund managers and wealthy tourists, so I don't know how many more Suicides and Silver Apples and Public Enemys and Eric B & Rakims are going to come out New York City."