"My first girlfriend used to listen to Joni Mitchell, and the album that she got me into was Court And Spark. I was 15 or 16 when I first heard it, and the acoustic playing is more like a jazzy sort of thing. I found that really cool. “I love her style as a guitarist, and I love the songs on that album, too. They’re quite funny, and they put you in a certain mood, like Free Man In Paris and People’s Parties. I like it a lot more than Blue and a lot more than Hejira, and the other ones that people go on about. It’s just really good. “Nick Drake’s Pink Moon [1972] also deserves a mention as a very important acoustic album for me. Can we have it as a bonus record?"

"I can’t help but love Giant. A lot of people don’t take Giant seriously. A lot of people like Rebel WIthout a Cause when you’re talking about a movie with James Dean and it’s okay, but I thought James Dean was practically Soupy Sales in that movie. Very over the top. Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor were great in this movie. It’s a classic sweeping story, it’s got a Gone with the Wind kind of vibe, and once again, the little guy who strikes oil becomes this power mad lunatic. Then the whole way they dealt with racism and how it was at the time in Texas, with the Latino wife of Dennis Hopper and that whole thing. Great story and well acted and looked like a movie, you know?"

"One of the best joke-for-joke movies ever put together, and many people haven’t seen it. That’s part of the reason why I’d like to [mention it]. I don’t want to create a list of movies that everyone has seen before; I want you guys to dig it out a little bit. A lot of physical humor, a lot of intellectual humor, just an insane movie for Woody Allen to make. Tons of jokes. People remember Sleeper and they remember Bananas, and Take the Money and Run and stuff like that. Love and Death gets lost a little in the Woody Allen shuffle. He has better films, like one I’ll name in a second, but he does not have a film with more jokes — just jokes — than Love and Death."

"When I was in college, first year, I saw it and I really hadn’t been exposed to a lot of European filmmakers. It’s such a ‘film’ film. It wasn’t required viewing, it was just a film playing on campus and I hadn’t been interested in film before then. Nowadays people are deciding to get into film at age five when they’re sitting, watching the Oscars. I really didn’t come out of that culture — I was pretty much a John Wayne fan and that was it. Zabriskie Point was a time when I was in a lot of change and flux and these incredible visuals hit me like they had rearranged the organs in my body. The ending and the free-floating debris and everything is an image that burned itself in my consciousness."

"It's a beautiful record. It's the Neu/Can supergroup in a way with Jaki from Can on drums and Michael on guitar. It's the pop end of Krautrock and sounds like Utopian sports montage music or something! It evokes the future, even still, for me or my idea of what the future would be at that time. It's a record I listened to a lot in recent years and just a record that I really recommend. I wouldn't have heard any of this stuff until the early-1990s but it was something we listened to a lot of as the Super Furry Animals. I quite like listening to instrumental music as it means I can still think over it without lyrics interfering; there's a time and a place for lyrics!
"

"Cabaret is the classic work [from director Bob Fosse], but Star 80 I think is really worth visiting, because it wasn’t a successful film and it really dealt with a kind of heinous crime. The film itself is brilliantly made, in terms of rhythm and storytelling; if you look at it you’ll see that a lot of directors of my era have been influenced by the aesthetic. Bob Fosse’s great ability with rhythmic storytelling is very alive in the movie, and what’s so intriguing is that it takes a true chapter in the history of Hugh Hefner and the world of Playboy and tells it as a kind of psychological thriller — but with a whole lot of Fosse-like theatricality. So I think that’s a kind of little off-the-radar gem."