"I heard this record in Minus Zero record shop in Portobello Road - it was an old shop that had been there since the early 70s or early 80s, and it stocked a lot of Bob Dylan, Beatles and The Beach Boys. Kind of power-pop albums. I used to go in there to buy Big Star and Big Star-related records, and it was the best place in the UK where I could do that. I'd gotten all the Big Star that I really needed in my life, but I wanted more Alex Chilton records. I asked the store to play me Like Flies On Sherbert. They put it on after saying it was rubbish, and the first thing I heard was the sound of tape stopping and re-starting; the record is full of lots of those sounds. It's a pretty lo-fi, raggedy-sounding record in terms of the production and the performances. It just sounded really unlike anything else I've ever heard before. Really loose and groovy. It's full of life - like a punk record with soul. You can tell that they were probably very high and drunk while they were making it - mistakes and everything are included in it. That's why I made a second About Group record called Start And Complete with Charles Hayward, Pat Thomas and John Coxon, in one day without anyone knowing the songs before we played them. I wanted to capture spontaneity. The record I made with About Group is much softer than this, as my style is very different, but this album is definitely an inspiration on me."

"Ernest Hemingway’s superb eight-page short story is the jumping-off point and inspiration for these two essential and very different movies (Stacy Keach reads the story magnificently in one of the DVD extras). I don’t understand why more people don’t know the 1946 Siodmak film. For my money, this is not only the best noir movie of all time but is just about my favorite Hollywood drama from the 1940s. The complex narrative structure begins as a jumbled Rubik’s Cube, and, slowly but surely, each piece falls into its precise place by movie’s end (the stuff Quentin Tarantino’s dreams are made of). The moody atmosphere provided by Siodmak and his technicians is a marvel. The cinematic execution of a heist has never been better. Here marks the birth of two glorious stars: Burt Lancaster (a beautiful caged animal, all teeth) and Ava Gardner (wow). Paul Schrader’s seminal essay on film noir, as a DVD extra, is invaluable. For those of you who wonder why Siegel’s 1964 violent, stylish, quirkily entertaining B version (the first TV movie ever made) is on this list, I have two words for you: Lee Marvin. There has never been a star like him before or since. Words simply cannot do justice to the magic of this guy—the timbre of his voice, the calm, paranoid, roughneck danger in his physical moves. In a spectacular extra on this DVD, fellow actor Clu Gulager gives a very moving (and, one feels while watching it, very truthful) account of working with Marvin, Siegel, and Ronald Reagan (who hated the movie—yet another reason to see it!)."

"I think my husband was friends with or had worked with her or something and then I downloaded the record on iTunes. It might have been the first time I downloaded anything on iTunes. I was like, "Woah, she's fucking killer." I think it's cool how she wears her influences on her sleeve the way LCD Soundsystem does. Why is it that when women are open about their influences people are like, "Oh, you're copying that person", but when men do it it just shows that they have such a good record collection and how awesome they are? I thought, "She's so cool, she doesn't give a shit." Her sound is amazing and her voice is so good. She just put out a new record that's great called 99¢ but I chose Santogold for this because that record has the song 'Creator' that is really important to me. When I would get down in the dumps, I'd put it on and it made me feel like a million bucks. She was my inspiration. That song was the song that got me through really bad times of feeling very unconfident as a singer and as a performer after I'd had four or five years off, and thinking, "Will I ever be able to come back to it?" and, "Looking back at what I've done, did any of it mean anything?" I was listening to 'Creator' and she feels so confident about the fact that she's an important artist in that song. It was very inspirational and made me feel, "I'm an important artist too!" Now I have to listen to her every time I'm cracking up."