"One of the first records I remember having any kind of relationship to was the soundtrack to 2001. At that point, I wasn’t allowed to put the needle on the record, but my dad would put it on, and, looking back now, I liked it ’cause it it scared me. There’s a lot of spooky stuff on there. I wanted to hear the record that was going to freak me out, and I wanted my dad in the room while it was being played. Growing up in Temple, Texas, my dad was the looser parent, the kind of guy who would wake the kids up in the morning by turning the stereo on really loud and blasting some upbeat music. In fact, the neighbor was always calling over to tell him to turn his stereo down. Later, he became a little more strict and got more religious; now he goes to mass every day. My parents split up in ’79, when I was 8. It was a pretty acrimonious break up. By then, I had a younger brother and sister, and we would go see my dad every other weekend. There was a certain voice my mom reserved only for my dad—when she would pick up the phone and use this voice, I knew it was him: “Oh hello.” There was a lot of animosity there for a long time, but as of the last couple of years, we have all shared Thanksgiving together for the first time since 1978, which has been really nice. My little brother now has a kid, so that brings everybody together."

"Growing up I didn't have an older brother, so all my music was formed by my mother and father. The latter would play old Irish folk songs and outlaw music by Johnny Cash and the only thing my mother would play was heavy melancholy orchestral movements like Night On Bald Mountain. What my mother would make me do is sit on the floor and tell my father to tell a story while putting on this record. This was big for me. I was probably four years old at the time. It sounded eerie, spooky and epic. My dad would make up these ghost stories but what he was really doing was recreating these children's story soundtracks that I'd listened to! I was too young to understand what he was doing at the time, but he was just making his personalised version of The Little Prince or Tales of Witches, Ghosts And Goblins. So he'd be like [eerie voice]: ""The ghosts would move up the Catskill Mountains..."" and I'd just sit there freezing in fear of these ghost stories! It was like having a musical campfire in your living room. Also, this song featured on the film Fantasia, which was my whole life up until the age of ten. It stuck with me and it was embedded in there now you're mixing visuals. I wasn't into the Mickey Mouse aspect of it, but when you watch the eerie castle and spooky ghosts, this is just feeding a young boy's imagination and this is the world he's going to confront when he grows up. These were all the ingredients going into my soup."

"To go back to the ’30s, which is the movies I saw when I was growing up on television — it was one that they never showed, because it was lost for years and it was by James Whale. It’s called The Old Dark House, 1932. It’s currently about to be reissued on Blu-ray. For years, all you could see were these sort of beat-up prints I think they found in the mid-’60s, and they had been lost, because of a remake and some rights issues and stuff. Now, it’s sort of come back, and it’s got a great cast of Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey. It’s the classic “travelers stranded in the haunted house and the bridge has washed out”, but it’s the template for all the movies that followed it. It’s still one of the more watchable and disturbing movies from that period. And it’s a shame that it isn’t better known; it never got television distribution, and it wasn’t included in the package of Universal horror pictures because it wasn’t in their library anymore. It’s a chance, I think, for people to catch up with it now. I’m a big James Whale fan, and this might be his best picture."