"In terms of the first film that I remember having a real visceral connection with me, it’d be The Producers, the original Producers, with Mel Brooks. There was something about such a rich movie, in terms of the richness of the ideas and the power of the quality. If you take the two central performances of Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, they’re such powerful performances. And you think that they’d both be almost too much for the screen because they both put in so much detail and they both bring so much energy. And they’re both such ballsy and powerful performances, you’d think that the screen wouldn’t be able to contain it. Especially because I was watching it on a TV screen, you think no screen is big enough to contain these two’s performance. But there’s something about the way they work together and the way their styles complement each other and the suitedness of those characterizations, the detail that they both put in. There was something about that. When you get two performers that are so beautifully in sync with each other, it’s like a jigsaw. Whatever one of them’s missing, the other kind of fills in with a perfectly compatible performance. It’s like listening to an opera, listening to those two perform with each other. I feel that way a lot about Mel Brooks in general, in terms of the way he writes and directs. There’s such musicality to that comedy. It’s so specific, and it reads like a musical score. You have to be able to play that absolutely precisely. There’s almost not enough room for interpretation on it. And for actors, they have to be able to say the lines. But the thing about Zero and Gene Wilder is they nail the musicality of it so perfectly and yet manage to layer all of this beautiful character on top of it as well. And they really attacked it. The chemistry and the musicality between them was something that really made me sit up and take notice when I was a young kid. It was very powerful, I remember it very vividly, seeing that for the first time."

"I first heard Alan Lomax's work while I was at university. I did music with visual art and film, but luckily at that time, it was just before this tutor left that had run it for 25 years, and he was quite old school but great because it was still fairly shambolic as a course and there was some good soulful stuff. Alan Lomax did lots and lots of field recordings around America and archived folk, blues and negro music and porchstep music. This particular album is when he went to Mississippi and Louisiana state penitentiaries and documented the prisoners as they were working in cotton fields. They've got music in their blood and that's what came through, I think. It's just absolute badass, amazing rhythms and there's a sort of sex to the music - they're singing about [sings] "be my woman and I'll be your man!", because they're obviously randy as hell and stuck in a fucking prison and working under really difficult conditions in the heat. There are different tracks where you can hear a load of axes and chains, and they would sing along to the axes hitting the stone, choirs of beautiful voices of men. 'Old Alabama's a really good one and 'Rosie' and what's so interesting is that I would listen to that and instantly there'd be a spider diagram going out. PJ Harvey on To Bring You My Love's 'Goodnight', she just stands there with a stick and hits it and there's a guy doing slide guitar. Moby, embarrassingly, sampled loads of it for free. Nick Cave and loads of artists I've loved, you just see bits of it in their music, it's that deep, dark, gothic soul, blues music. This is the raw, concentrated, original bit. There's a kind of spiritual rawness to it, they're spiritual songs about missing love and family. "I'll spend the rest of my days in these four stone walls." The fact that this mad white guy from somewhere decided to go and capture all of these voices - I know there are a lot of rights issues surrounding Alan Lomax, but I think just in terms of being an archivist, I think a lot of that stuff would've been completely lost, so it's great."