"The third choice is a song from Boston, from the band Boston, called "Peace of Mind". And it’s not my all-time favorite song. It’s just one day many years ago, I was in the garage of my apartment, wrenching on my pickup truck, one Sunday night. And there used to be a popular syndicated show, I think it was called Rock Line, and they would get these musicians on and they would talk about their music and their songs. Not too much differently from what we’re doing now. And they had the guy from Boston on, and they said, "What is 'Peace of Mind?' What was that song about?" And the guy said, "I had a good job. I worked for IBM. I had things. You know, I had medical and dental, but I didn’t have peace of mind. I wanted to play music. So I quit my job, and I started this band. And I threw all caution to the wind, and I decided to roll the dice, and give it a try." I was sitting in my garage, when I was like 23, working on my pickup truck thinking, “Do I want to do construction forever? Or maybe I want to give comedy a try.” And it was sort of at that moment, I decided to do comedy. Now, I didn’t make a nickel for the next decade, but at a certain point it worked out."

"The Firm, which was a film that I got a chance to be in, and got a chance to work with Sydney [Pollack] and really rub shoulders with Gene Hackman for the first time. Well, actually, I had been with Gene in Mississippi Burning. But I got to work with Gene Hackman and Tom Cruise and Holly Hunter and Gary Busey and Wilford Brimley. But Sydney Pollack had a great career as a director and I always admired his approach to things. Jeanne Tripplehorn was in The Firm also, did a great job as Tom’s wife. I love the music in The Firm. Dave Grusin wrote the music. I thought the film was very well put together, and when you take a novel, sometimes the film doesn’t match up, and I thought The Firm did match up. I read the novel and was very impressed with the scary Nordic guy who was sort of shadowing Tom Cruise’s character throughout the novel. He was just scary. And then, I’d say it was a year or two years later that my agents got a call from Pollack. I think he knew my work from the Actor’s Studio in New York, because Sydney was always very involved with the studio, and I think he was also a fan of Mississippi Burning and had seen that film. That took its own wings, and he just offered the role of the Nordic, and I thought, “Wow, that’d be great.” So I got to go to Memphis, Tennessee, the home of rock ‘n’ roll."

"Hair is a really cool musical. It's about the late 60s’ hippie movement in America - tribal love, peace 'n' love 'n' rock 'n' roll, people tripping on LSD and expanding their consciousness, all of these concepts that came about in the late 60s’. It's one of my favourite periods in music and in the arts, it was sort of our American renaissance right around then and lot of incredible music came from that time. “I'm an Aquarius; that's my zodiac sign. I think the song is talking about the Age of Aquarius, which was starting around that time, which was said to be a time of enlightenment. It's such a cool song, it has a great melody and I've always loved it. “I ended up doing a production of Hair out in Germany when I was about 22. Personally, it was such an eye opener, I was pretty green when I went out there, but not so green when I left. I was doing a lot of things for the first time and experiencing a lot of things for the first time. “It was a bit of an awakening for me - artistically and personally - with fashion and with sexuality and with all these different things. It was a big transformative moment for me and this song always reminds me of that time.”"

"It's one of my favourite concept albums, one of my favourite psychedelic albums, one of my favourite albums from that period full stop. I don't really know what the story to it is, I've never really bothered to figure it out, I just think The Pretty Things are one of the coolest bands of all time. There's something so edgy about their take on British Brian Wilson-influenced music. I love Odessey and Oracle, and I love all the more famous concept albums, but there's something about S.F. Sorrow that feels so much more rock 'n' roll, there's something about the way that they play that feels like punk rock for its time. They just have a real cool edgy energy, but at the same time it's sophisticated and lush. Obviously there were a lot of different bands experimenting in England at that time, but this is special to me because it feels more glib and more flippant, and less precious. It's well thought through but it has a useful punk edge that puts them in another class. I think one of the first times I really got into this album and realised what a masterpiece it is was ten or eleven years ago when I first met my girlfriend Charlotte. We went up with a few friends to a farm in Pennsylvania. It was the first time Charlotte and I kissed, it was a very magical lost country weekend. I remember hearing this record a lot that weekend. I already knew about The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle and I was a huge Beach Boys fan, but I didn't realise that the Pretty Things had done something so complete. They were leading the way, they were ahead of their time and not just copying the others, they were setting the bar."

"My Dad also turned me onto The Stooges and their record Fun House. “Down on the Street” was another one of those songs that had me mouth agape, drooling and not knowing what I was listening to exactly. It was like sound effects. He was making a sound from that guitar - that reverb on that riff is the sweetest reverb in Rock and Roll history - and Iggy is singing through an amp which is all fucked up and distorted. “Down on the Street” is something that’s strange and I like it that way. It’s not something I analyse or geek out on, it makes you feel a certain way and makes everything tougher and cooler. Talk about swagger, that song is the epitome of swagger. It’s like performance art. My Dad turned me onto them but listening to bands like The Damned and Nirvana led me back to them. I’m always coming back to that record, it’s so raw and so punk, it’s a masterpiece. Fun House is fucking incredible, song after song too. It’s unrelenting until the end, finally, you get a nice long jam. I’ve always been interested in whatever Iggy does. He’s one of those real freaks, he’s a true, true artist, who feels his way through life and I like that. It’s one of those things, but I wish I was in that band. I would have loved to have been in that band!"

"I guess I probably knew Dylan before I knew about The Band and kind of found The Band through Dylan. But I like the way that all of them sing. The three of them in particular, they've got really great, really characterful voices. And they do that thing of switching voices so you get the first verse with Rick Danko and then the bridge will be Robbie Robertson and that changes the perspective and stuff. And that's something that when Gang Of Four started, by the time we got to Entertainment!, one of the things we wanted was different characters. I kind of saw songs sometimes as being a little play, a little drama, so you have different characters. You have the main protagonist and maybe the other voice would be making comments about that character or somebody else would be a different character. To a certain extent, some of that came from The Band, I think. They're a weird bunch, they came from Canada, ended up in America and they kind of drew parallels between themselves and North American history and the way a lot of Canadians ended up in New Orleans and they called them Acadian driftwood. And they kind of sing about aspects of the Civil War and stuff like that. And also they've got a sense of history. It's very much not standard rock & roll subject matter, you know. It's not cars, girls, guitars, and I love that. And they're emotionally touching. They didn't have easy lives, things didn't pan out brilliantly. I'm touched by the way that you can hear their struggles through life in their music and what they're saying."

"""My favourite Julian Cope is loose Julian Cope. Back in the day, I was already a fan of his, because of World Shut Your Mouth and Saint Julian; those were great records, not super loose, but very rock and roll. Then, he put out My Nation Underground, which I was pretty dissatisfied with. It had its moments, but it was too produced, and so '80s. I think even he’s disowned that one now. ""After that, I’d be surprised, because I’d be going to the record store and he’d be putting out these albums with no announcement. One of them was Skellington, which this song is from. That record was huge for me, to the point that I named one of my early bands after it. Droolian came after that and it just felt like, when he really hit his peak with Peggy Suicide and Jehovahkill, it was those previous two albums that really laid the groundwork. ""They were totally loose and off the cuff, he was mumbling the lyrics and the liner notes said that he hadn’t ever really finished them. They’re not commercial records and that made them all the more fascinating to me. They’re more human. It was a lesson - not every record has to be polished. You don’t need to appeal to everyone who’s known you up until then. It’s good to throw up the occasional roadblock. ""Plus, at that moment in time, he was doing the whole “Being a rock star” thing better than anybody else. I hung off of anything he had to say; it felt like nothing he was saying wasn’t extraordinary. I mean, the title of the song says it all. He's just an amazing character."

"Around the time that this album was released I was driving my car and I heard 'Man In The Box' [from 1990's Facelift] playing on the radio. To me it sounded like another style of music that was completely out of the leftfield. The incredible combination of Layne [Staley]'s voice and Jerry [Cantrell, guitarist] is just so cool. They were making music like a lot of these bands that was getting played on the radio, and even today in America you need to have songs that can make it onto the radio. They knew that, and they got played all the time. Their vibe was entirely different to KoЯn, and KoЯn's was entirely different to Nirvana, who were in turn different to Pantera. All of these bands were coming out at the same time but they were all making their own unique impressions. It's incredible really. If you look at the history of rock & roll, the beginning of that decade was one of the most exciting times. There was never really anyone with a similar vocal style to Layne though, and that's important too. I think a lot of it is always down to the singer to some extent."