"As a drummer, Klaus Dinger was important to me: [he taught me] how to make one riff last a lifetime! It's a great riff though, don't get me wrong. Neu! was absolutely brilliant; it's another record where the first time you buy it and put it on, you think 'I've never heard anything like this before'. I was into Krautrock and that's why I bought it - I bought anything that came out of Germany - but Neu! were just completely out there. I had no idea who was in the band, there was just a big 'Neu!' image on the front… it was striking, kind of punk. The way that they used cut up music, and bits of ambient sound… as soon as I heard it, I thought 'If I ever start a band, I'd like them to sound a bit like this - as adventurous as this'. A lot of Krautrock was trying to plough its own furrow, but there were other bits that were trying to Germanize Western things. And the odd thing about it is, I never knew that Michael Rother lived in Wilmslow for a time - which is just around the corner from me - in the 70's. I was watching a Krautrock documentary and he was saying: “I've always been surrounded by flowing water, there's always been a river - the Rhine, the Elbe, the Bollin.” And I said: “Hang on, did he just say the Bollin!? That's just down the road!”"

"The Bridge on the River Kwai was one of those movies that my father and I watched for the first time, and he prefaced it by saying, “You’re probably not going to like this movie now, but you’re going to understand it later.” [laughs] And I remember watching it with that I mind — because I was young — and now I’m at the end of… You know, my dad is no longer with me, and I look at Alec Guinness’s character in it, and I now understand him. Where, at a point earlier in my life, I didn’t understand him — I was like, “Why is this guy building a bridge for the enemy? Why would a person get so obsessed with this just to try to keep order?” — I now understand it. It’s one of those movies that means a lot to me, because it was the first time that I think my father showed me that movies can actually speak to an ageless part of your soul. I remember the first time I saw Unforgiven, and I thought it was going to be like this big Western shoot-em-up, and I was like, “Man, I didn’t like that movie at all.” Then, I was at work the next day, and I thought, “I can’t stop thinking about that movie. Maybe I saw it wrong.” And now it’s one of the best movies ever. Bridge on the River Kwai was the first time I ever realized that."