"I remember being baffled by the first Sam Fuller film I saw when I was in my late teens or early twenties, a revival at the old St. Mark’s theater on Second Avenue in New York. The audience was guffawing and cheering and I thought it was really stupid: some kind of condescending intellectual slumming, about a movie that looked to me like plain harmless, and pretty much sincere, if inept, cheap melodramatic exposé. It was Shock Corridor. The movie was bad, but the audience was worse. I can’t remember which film turned me around. The Naked Kiss? That’s a great one, as is Shock Corridor. Eventually I also learned how highly Fuller is rated by the most intellectual film analysts. I think what makes Fuller so popular with them is Fuller’s unpretentiousness, not because it’s naive, but because it makes him a purer example of filmmaking talent: since there’s no subtlety, no subtext, no self-consciousness, it means that to enjoy it you’ve got to enjoy it for the pure, abstract methods of film as film. Famously, his roots are in two realms, tabloid journalism and World War II (where he saw a lot of action with the infantry). In a scene at a party in Godard’s Pierrot le fou, when he’s asked what cinema is, he says, “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion.” And that’s the way his films feel: like they’re emotion, the way music is. They’re not about ideas except on the most basic level, like a tabloid. They’re “hard-boiled,” and there’s tabloid/sensationalist fury and irony. His fight scenes are thrilling and like no one else’s; you can recognize them in a second. His style altogether is distinctive. Everything is in your face. Lots of close-ups, lots of tracking in for close-ups, long takes with plenty of camera movement. It is like pulp journalism, like a fluid Weegee. Emotion. As corny and cartoony as she is, Thelma Ritter’s last scene in this is really moving. She actually got an Academy Award nomination for supporting actress for the role. The close-up smooching of Richard Widmark and Jean Peters can leave you breathless too, even though the sessions usually end with him mocking or slapping her. In 1974, when I was first singing my song “Love Comes in Spurts” at CBGB, I sometimes used to introduce it with the line that comes when Widmark’s kissed an eager Peters and she’s told him she really likes him and he sneers, “Everybody likes everybody when they’re kissing.”

"It's like with David Bowie - there was a bit of me that didn't want to include The Smiths because of comparisons, but I couldn't not. The Smiths were a very important band to me when I was 15, 16. It was perfect timing. In the 80s, when The Smiths were still around, I was the right age for what he was singing about to be relevant to me. I was going through adolescence so the resonance was even stronger. So yes, The Queen Is Dead. Did I choose it because it's my favourite Smiths album or because it's recognised as being the best? There's probably a bit of both in there. It's funny actually, looking back on it there are so many great Smiths songs, but there's so much on singles and B-sides that weren't on the albums, which was definitely an influence on how we did things with Suede. I remember when this first came out it was such an exciting thing. I remember hearing 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' on the radio and thinking, 'Wow'. It was a real fan moment. I remember queuing up at Rounder Records in Burgess Hill, and then playing it, and going through the lyrics. 'Cemetry Gates' was the song that I loved the most at the time, back in 1986. I thought the wordplay was amazing. Obviously Morrissey is known as a great lyricist but I think he's probably the greatest lyricist. I don't think Dylan is in the same league, with his songs about the 'Jack of Hearts' and things like that. Some of his lyrics are great, but they're not as powerful as Morrissey's. He had a brilliantly balanced dance between the wit and darkness. It was never too comical; well, apart from 'Frankly, Mr Shankly'. You know what I mean - it was this amazing tightrope walk of being slightly ridiculous but incredibly engaging and incredibly serious. And Johnny Marr's guitar playing is amazing. He's one of the greatest ever. Incredible melodies and the craftsmanship of his guitar playing without it ever sounding boring. It never got into Steve Vai territory. It was always tasteful without ever being dull. In the context of the time when musically everything was so cheap-sounding, The Smiths were making - for want of a better word - really organic-sounding music, but it was still very exciting and strangely quite ground-breaking. They were a really inspiring band for so many people, and for a couple of years they were the greatest, they really were."

"This era of the Velvet Underground is possibly, along with Ray Davies, my favourite kind of singing. It’s sort of weedy and again without testosterone and certainly without force, it was just very, very hip and not trying too hard. It’s interesting, because did a band ever sound as hip, not trying, but still delivering? “Velvet Underground were a real staple of my generation, in that a bunch of kids in the mid-70s’ discovered them retrospectively, probably in a way that I’d imagine kids now discover The Smiths. They sounded genuinely subversive without being obscure, they were real, proper songs and there was a great poetry in there. “Often when you talk about songs to people, most people assume you’re talking about the words - to a lot of people that’s what a song is. But because I got so obsessed so young with the mechanics of the music, the production and how things came together, often I wasn’t really too bothered if the words didn’t make much sense. I’ve had amazing experiences with songs that had words that absolutely didn’t make any sense, like ‘Jeepster’. “‘Foggy Notion’ is a really good example of a song that’s just really rocking - the guitar is really hyped up and swings like crazy - that makes you feel really good and absolutely doesn’t need any serious lyrical content. In fact, sometimes - and I suspect it’s the case with ‘Foggy Notion’ because I know it so well - if the lyrics were snagging your attention too much it would distract from what it’s supposed to do. You’ve got to remember it was for young people in the 60s’ to Frug to, doing these dance moves in cool striped-shirts and cool shades and ‘Foggy Notion’ is all about that and the sound of the voice. I think that’s a great thing and something people who think songs are entirely about meaning and words aren’t aware of. “It’s an interesting thing with The Velvet Underground, because if you imagine The Rolling Stones back then, who were supposedly the baddest of the bad boys and The Beatles who were supposed to be the hippest and most worldly, I wonder what they made of The Velvets at the time or if they’d heard them. I know Dylan was aware of them, but writing songs like ‘Heroin’ and ‘The Black Angel's Death Song’, I wonder if you were in The Beatles or The Stones you were just going ‘Oh no, we’re so X-Factor.’"

"My friend Tony recommended Jolie Holland. I'd never heard it. He heard it through his girlfriend, and he said, ""This has been made in a bedroom and it's beautiful."" She even coughs in the middle of a song, she does: ""All the morning birds"", she hits a beautiful, fluty high note and then clears her throat and she just left that recording the way it was. I was so into it, much like the Chet Baker record. It's just a singular mood. You put the whole album on and drift off into her world for a bit with her. And it is literally a bedroom musing. And then I found out it was one of Tom Waits's favourite records. That was validation to my opinion, and I just loved it. Then when I came to making my solo record, very nervous but on a whim, I contacted Jolie and said: ""There is no one on earth I'd rather do a duet with, and I know you don't know me from Adam, but any chance?"" And she got back and she said, ""I'd love too"", and we recorded 'Electricity' together, which was great. We were both conducting transatlantic love affairs at the time, and I'm obsessed with the transatlantic phone cable, what it took to lay it. It's 3,000 miles, it's 10-feet thick cable, and every time it snapped they had to start again. The way they did it, it was steamships in those days, so paddle steamers in effect. Two steamers met mid-Atlantic and circled each other, while attaching their halves of the cable together. And then took off in different directions, that's how it happened. And there was a huge fuss when it was connected. Everybody celebrating. Imagine the money involved in the endeavour, because every time it snapped that it, you've lost the cable, you've got to start again. When it arrived in New York and in England, of course both sides celebrating wildly; in actual fact, it stopped working after a couple of days. These endeavours were fresh in my head at the time, so Jolie and I wrote a song called 'Electricity', which is about precisely that, conducting a love affair transatlantically. My favourite bit being I said to her at one point: ""What haven't we said that you always say on a long-distance phone call?"" And she said, ""'What are you wearing?'"" And I said, it's got to go in, but you're singing it [laughs]."