"I kind of think Fitzcarraldo. Cinephiles know it, but the new generation don’t really know that picture. It’s a flawed film but if you watch that and the companion making-of [Burden of Dreams]… there’s a great Criterion of it; it’s the one with Mick Jagger in it, when he started the film and had to pull out. What I love about this film is that it represents what I love about film making: The film is about a person who has an insane passion for art, to the extent that they drag a boat over a small isthmus to make money, but he’s making money to bring Caruso, the great Italian Opera singer, to build an opera house. But the backstory, with Klaus [Kinski], and the relationship between Klaus and [director] Werner [Herzog], is so fantastic a backstory. I mean, they try and kill each other. And I think the intense passion between actor and director is in the film. To me it’s kind of a package deal, this film. You have to involve yourself in the movie, but it’s really worth going beneath the film, up the jungle and into the psyche of the drama itself. Its companion film is one of my favorites of all-time, Apocalypse Now — and you can go on the same journey with that film."

"I remember hearing a PJ Harvey song, it might have been ‘Down by The Water’, and thinking ‘this is wicked, I’m gonna buy some of her music!’ At that age I had pocket money, about five pounds, so I went to this music shop in Exeter, found the PJ Harvey section, and all they had was this cheap cassette of 4-Track Demos. I was learning the drums around that time, and listening to the drums in a way I’d never done before, getting obsessive about it. I bought this PJ Harvey record, I put it on and thought ‘OK, the drums are gonna come in soon!’, but of course they never come in, it’s all demos. It was insanely disappointing! But I’d payed the money for this record, so I listened to it, and it became this educational thing for me of understanding that this was part of writing a song. Comparing the demos to the finished tracks, it was an interesting thing to hear and I think the most important thing I’d take from it is investing in something that deprives you of the one thing you were really excited about. It’s a good lesson, but completely unplanned, an interesting exercise to realise that the thing I feel is the most important thing, is not."