"A compilation from South Africa in the 80s of Soweto sound at the time. My mum's from SA and she had it on double cassette and would play it in the car as she drove me to school. It's full of unashamed joy and has a kind of cheesiness to it that I love. There's an innocence to the songs, which is interesting because you can sense the strange American influence in SA music at the time - which is similarly mirroring some current musical trends from abroad. You can hear Prince, a bit of Michael Jackson and American pop, but retranslated through musicians and equipment that they had access to at the time. It's a killer compilation."

"This is an amazing film, so visually stunning and strange and melancholic. It’s a good film to remind me of a time period that I was living at that time; it made me feel very heavy, you know, as a kid in 1985. I would have been twelve or thirteen, and it was just a formative time of existence. It affected me in a pretty intense way, just simply by its mood alone. Terry Gilliam’s imagination was so surreal and rich. And the propulsion of the story with the atmosphere in this world, and the gadgets and inventions and trials that all these characters have to go through, it’s a fantastic voyage of the mind."

"True, other Elsa Lanchester albums have her husband Charles Laughton introducing each track, but only this one has both "When a Lady Has a Piazza" and "If You Peek in My Gazebo." Lanchester, most famous for playing the Bride of Frankenstein (technically, the bride of Frankenstein's monster) and Laughton's wife in Witness For The Prosecution, has an actor's voice, with perfect stage-Cockney enunci-OY-tion, which is perfect for this material. "Please sell no more drink to my father. It makes him so strange and so wild. Heed the prayer of my heart-broken mother, and pity the poor drunkard's child." She sings this with such relish, it's easy to see whose side she's really on. "

"Cassavetes’ movies to me are a kind of pure energy. He’s the very opposite of Ozu because he cared nothing at all about form. Yet for some strange reason, by not caring about form at all—he just went for it—this produced, in formal aspects, the same result as when you pay a lot of attention to form. His energy with actors can also be felt. In each shot, you can feel what he wants to tell us about story, and you get the feeling that this has to be acted now, shot in the very moment. I would say it’s possibly something very American. This pure energy of making is very American, and it’s very optimistic."

"Another favorite of mine was actually filmed during World War II—Brief Encounter. This one deals with love. And of course there are many kinds of love. One, I suppose, the best kind, I think, is to find someone to love who reciprocates your love. I'm really the marrying kind. And I love being married to Cindy, who, incidentally, happens to be a very fine filmmaker. But another kind of love is to love hopelessly, to love someone you can never have, the awful sweetness of longing for the unattainable, that strange and blissful frustration. Brief Encounter, so gorgeously acted, so lovingly directed, is the finest film ever depicting that kind of love. Both heartbreaking and romantic."

"I remember listening to this when I flew to Tokyo around 2012 to promote my first solo album, Here Come The Bombs. I’d heard bits over the years – Mick Quinn was a big fan of German rock’n’roll of the mid-70s. I was on the plane listening to this, then I arrived and went for a wander around and listened to the whole thing. It really seemed to fit with the strange landscape because it’s a modern, electronic album but it’s also really organic with wobbly synthesisers and you can hear the hiss on the drum machine. I’m not sure whether they were recording quickly or it was the gear, but I like its unstable quality."