"I don't think I can explain how significant that record was to me. And the more I travel through my life as a musician, the more I find myself coming back to it again and again. My mom had a giant stack of vinyl – mostly classical, with a few rock records. When I was seven or eight years old and started listening to music by myself, that album became the daily soundtrack to my life. I would ask someone to put the record player on for me and I would sit there with big headphones one, listening, and having the record flipped over again and again and again. I would put the music on and just stare at the cover for 45 minutes. The artwork was so important. Sgt Pepper's was full of lyrics I could understand, stories I could follow, music that just made complete sense to me. I understood all of it, and it took me into a world. I think that was the first time I really fell in love with a record. I loved 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' and 'She's Leaving Home', but one of my favourites was the opening track. What I really wanted – what I still want – was to feel like I was at some amazing happening. As a seven-year-old fantasising about being a rockstar, which I was just starting to do, every time I listened to that opening track, I imagined that somewhere there's this group of people in this psychedelic wonderland listening to the Beatles. I didn't have any clue who the Beatles were or what they meant, I didn't have any fucking context. I just knew that if there was a party, this was the one I wanted to be at."

"Laurie Anderson I discovered in college along with a whole other collection of artists, like Philip Glass, John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. I took an experimental music class when I was 18, which opened up this entire world of music I'd been missing. In high school I listened to Einsteurzende Neubauten and I'd pick up weird-looking found sound records from the used record bin at my local record store, but this was the first time I'd really studied it. Looking back at the vast majority of music that influenced me as a teenager, 99% of it was by boys. Before, my female influences had been Cyndi Lauper and Madonna and Alison Moyet. But Laurie Anderson was just playing an entirely different game. She was just making the bizarre music that she wanted to. She didn't need to glam up. I just remember looking at the fucking album cover of Big Science and thinking 'This is the coolest fucking woman in the world.' She looks like she gives no shit about what anyone thinks of her, in a way that surpassed Riot Grrrl or anything like that. And the fact that she had a powerhouse intellect and was a storyteller... she set a new bar in my head. She was a performance artist, which was what I wanted to be when I was 18. I imagined that I'd do something with theatre and music, probably both. I never thought as myself as any great shakes as a musician – and I still don't – but I thought of myself as a great creative performer. What Laurie Anderson and Pauline Oliveros were doing was taking the instruments they'd been taught and transmuting them into this beautiful, strange world of art. They were taking that stuff and fucking it up, and that gave me a lot of hope."

"I had an instant soft spot for Ari Aster when he treated anaphylaxis (in “Hereditary”) as the terror that it really is, whilst some other contemporary directors sadly still think someone’s face swelling up is hilarious. “Midsommar” really goes to places untraveled. I heard a lot about its folk-horror roots along with similarities to “The Wicker Man,” but I keyed much more into its cathartic wail borne out of grief. I remember seeing a video of the performance artist and musician, John Duncan lying naked on the floor and letting out an extraordinarily protracted primal scream and the dark heart of “Midsommar” lies somewhere within that realm for me. The film is brimming with the explosive power of grief and it’s one of the starkest examples I can think of in modern cinema. My first reaction when seeing all that verdant grass was the almost invisible menace of ticks — an anxiety that Aster quickly acknowledges. The fear of tick-borne encephalitis is not unusual in both Sweden and Hungary where the film was shot and in some askew and unintentional way, I could imagine seeing the film alternately as a fever dream of someone who had been afflicted by the disease during a meadow ritual. Of course, the front of house is hallucinogenic folk horror, but maybe I bypassed that due to my lack of knowledge, which led to a more primal and simplistic interpretation. I was also blown away by the presence of Björn Andrésen, whom I remember from Visconti’s “Death in Venice.” Aster’s film buff credentials are really to the fore here even though I’m aware that nobody sadly uses the term “film buff” anymore. The ghosts of Bergman, Jancsó and Paradjanov circle the film."