"I’ve always been a fan of Miguel. I remember listening to Kaleidoscope Dream in a hotel room in New York; there’s this real sexy, urbane quality to that album. His next record, Wildheart, has a real lo-fi sultriness—there’s this weird disparity between those two things, because people think of sultry as being writ-large, with this polished quality, but when you give it this bedroom-recording quality, it adds a sensitivity and a vulnerability that Miguel just has in spades. I love the way he spells out the titles of his songs in lowercase, too. He has a way of being sweetly diminutive and then larger than life. “Told You So,” from his new album, War & Leisure, really grabbed me right away. I first heard it when I was in my bedroom getting ready to go out, which is really important music listening for me. It always feels like a motivational soundtrack and returns me to my teenage self: creating an imagined narrative that usually never comes to fruition. I always think the getting-ready part somehow supersedes the experience itself. It’s better than the party. Even when I’m alone, when I’m still in the realm of fantasy of what the night could be, it’s always better than what the night is. And I’m definitely just talking about going out to very pedestrian events—it’s not like I’m going out to some wild dance party. But music has always accompanied those moments of trying on different clothes, looking at myself in front of the mirror, trying to do something even remotely reasonable with makeup—it always feels aspirational, and buoying. That was the first time I heard “Told You So.” I really thought, “This will be my going-out song for the next six months.” And it has been."

"I got to love this album when I was 18, working in a second hand clothes shop in Glasgow, where one of the guys I worked with played it constantly. It was the first time I had heard music that felt like genuine contemporary protest music. The combination of Chuck D’s informed eloquence and unashamed confrontational stance was so potent. Here was a guy name-checking Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the same breath as Coltrane and Anthrax. It was revolutionary in every sense. It felt dangerous. These guys had the FBI tapping their phones and were taking on the behemoth of the US establishment. While in retrospect the S1Ws may be the campest paramilitaries in history, the imagery of guerrilla conflict intensified the sense of resisting persecution. Like the best groups, it felt like a gang, too. Flav the joker, Chuck the boss, Terminator-X voiceless, but ever-present. Tight. Then there was the music. That fragmented repetition. Those bursts of brass and breakbeats, squealing like sirens against stolen guitars. Amazing. It didn’t sound like anything else. While Chuck D and his cartoon foil Flavor Flav had the lyrical articulacy, Terminator-X, Professor Griff and the Bomb Squad matched it musically. Their imagination was in context – how to take something from its original context, place it against something else out of context to create something way more powerful than either in isolation. In many ways, I still see this LP as the pinnacle of rap. Of course it is of its time and sonic trends advanced, but for sheer inventiveness and lyricism it has never been matched. It felt like rap was violently booting the world into a better direction – a brief flash of genius before it became mired in the vocabulary of egoism, misogyny and avarice. There have been great pinnacles since, but nothing matches this moment."

"I think the period from 1979 to 1982 was the best period for British pop music. And out of all that stuff it's 'Oliver's Army' that I've chosen. It gets more incredible the older I get and the more I understand about it. Visually, when it first came out, Elvis Costello was like a Halloween version of Buddy Holly. It's all distorted - his clothes were too big for him and his glasses were too big for him. He didn't look like a very nice guy - quite frightening - but singing this amazing song. Some songs will move your feet, emotions, and some will move your head - and this has got all of this, all together. I knew all the words. I'd write the words down in my exercise book at school, but I didn't understand any of it. But they're such good words you don't really have to. I love that first line: "Don't start me talking/ I could talk all night". It just brings up that image of youthful idealism - we can sit up all night talking. Before you get into drink, drugs and all that, you just sit up talking because you can. I love that. It could Paris in the late 60s, or London at the end of the century, or Greenwich Village. Musically, I just read about the piano part... Elvis didn't like the song at all and they were going to scrap it, so the piano player suggested, "Why don't we play something like ABBA?" I think it's 'Dancing Queen'. And then they put that on and that was it. But no one wanted to say yes at first as it wasn't a very cool thing to do."

"The longer I live and the more movies I know, the more I love Stanley Donen. However, I fell in love with this film as a child. I went to see it because—well, because I saw everything that came to the Paramount Theater (or the Capitol) in Ashland, Kentucky. But I was especially primed for loving this movie because I was enamored of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly—I had seen that movie ten times the previous year. But Charade was a very different movie from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and for a little girl—and for that time—it was very violent, and it scared the hell out of me so much that I thought James Coburn was in my closet at night, and I made my mother go with me to check if he was there before bedtime. Nevertheless, I went back for more every weekend until its run was over. I loved the witty romance between Cary Grant and Audrey, and I loved Paris as much as I had loved New York in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And the mystery works! And I loved that so much I went back again and again, even if it scared the pee outta me. On the DVD, director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone banter amusingly from a long friendship together on the long process it took to make this film. Stone makes the great observation that when you write a mystery, you make it for a second viewing. And if the audience says, “That’s a cheat,” then you didn’t do it right. But if they see it a second time and say, “Oh, it was there all the time, and I didn’t see it,” then you have something. This film has all that and more—i.e., the best clothes ever!"