"This wasn’t my introduction to folk music by any means, but it was my introduction to Irish folk music that wasn’t merely The Dubliners or The Chieftains. It was Irish music that had a bit of balls and a bit of a wayward quality that came I think from those guys knowing about rock music and, generally speaking, what was going on in the UK. You could call them the first progressive folk band. They had a good way of bringing together bits of tradition, mostly Irish traditional music, with an awareness in terms of arrangements that could only come from a knowledge of other musical forms. And of course they feature what was a growing, new instrument, a non-indigenous instrument of Irish music: the bouzouki. Not the bowl-shaped Greek bouzouki but the flat-backed bouzouki that was being made by luthiers in Britain and Ireland as a more convenient, big boy’s mandolin. The bouzouki became an important part of Irish folk music and Planxty used it to great effect."

"Taking a slight turn, I love the John Wayne film The Quiet Man. It’s quite something. It’s a John Ford movie, it’s John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. It’s kind of like John Wayne’s Brigadoon. He plays this boxer who killed a man in the ring in the States, and so, to escape his past, he moves to his ancestral little home in Ireland. It’s this quaint little village, and I believe it’s called Innisfree — I know Innisfree is from a Yeats poem, and it sort of represents the small Irish town of heaven; it’s sort of a fantastical place — but the town in The Quiet Man is Innisfree, which makes sense. So he goes there to escape his past, falls in love, of course, with Maureen O’Hara — who wouldn’t? — and her brother turns out to be the enormous, pugilistic, evil, Bluto-like landlord. So the movie cannot be resolved, nor can their love, without one final fistfight. It’s funny; just the other day, I sent a message to my agent, “Remake idea: The Quiet Man?” I have two fists. I can swagger."