"I heard The Afghan Whigs real early on and I was like, ‘Alright, this is like soul music but it’s played by white guys from Cincinnati, and I don’t even know if they can play that well.’ They eventually could play really well, and they turned me on to this whole other way of thinking that showed me you could mix all these things together without ever crossing over into pop music, which I felt when I was younger was just not something that I related to. Crime Scene Part One was a huge song for me because it was like a movie. It was brooding and there was something spooky about it, and then when you find out what it’s about it’s really scary. From there I went straight into Tom Waits.”"

"I’d heard rumour of them making this record and the rumour behind it was they were getting all these people – like, "Rob Halford’s on the record, what the fuck?" That record came out and it was such a brave turn. It’s so good, it’s still in my truck that I drive around in, it hasn’t come out of the 6-CD changer since it came out back then. My daughters have learned to love that record, they’re like, "oh, put on the Queens album!" It was another group effort album where I think Josh had a vision and Nick and all those guys were all at their... not zenith, ‘cos Josh has done a bunch of stuff since then that was just as good, but that record did set them apart."

"The rumour goes that when the guys from the record company [wanted to] hear Spirit Of Eden, knowing the commercial success of The Colour Of Spring, Talk Talk wouldn't let them hear a note until the album was finished. They took a long time. The story goes that the label guy went to the studio, they lit some candles and put on that record and he cried and left. To this day they don't know whether he was moved or thought it was terrible. But from a personal point of view, they started out by their own admission as a Duran Duran copy band. I was tempted to put a solo record [by Mark Hollis] on the list as well. But I thought that was labouring the point."

"The Godfather. The palette of the movie, the colors. There’s something about the production design and the cinematography. Everything about that. I mean, I like the story, the characters, all that, but the thing, when I think of the movie — like if I’m flipping channels and it’s on, I have to stop and watch it — the thing that catches me is always just its rich, rich, rich deep palette. It’s incredible. I mean, they’re all great films, the first one especially. When I was a kid and it was on TV, I would always have to go make spaghetti and watch it. I could not watch that movie without having spaghetti and tomato sauce. There was just something so evocative about those guys making sauce in the kitchen."

"Jaws, because I just showed it to my kids for the first time. They’d seen snippets, but that’s the first time I said, “Okay, you guys are old enough. Gotta bite the bullet; we’re going to watch the damn thing all together.” My son, my ten-year-old, was like… So I watched it when I was seven because it was released on my birthday in 1975. June 20th, 1975, Jaws came out, and that was my birthday present. He was like — with the sheets — doing this [mimics pulling covers over head] over his head, and I was like, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m practicing to make sure they go up high enough.” [laughs] So we watched that. They loved that, and they were like, “What else can we watch?”

"I remember seeing it at the time and thinking it was fantastically irritating. It was the post punk period and I didn't really like that woozy American liberal culture of the time. Then I re-watched it a few years later and really enjoyed it. It's so amoral and horrible and of course there's the kind of post Vietnam thing of all the people who are against the ROTC and the militaristic guys. The end scene where they totally fuck up the parade is just amazing. It's very entertaining and now it looks really great. That American liberalism looks like an endangered species these days. Something like Animal House or Smokey and the Bandit couldn't be made now – smoking joints and breaking the law – America's gone a lot more right wing since then."