"Second film: All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey and you know, on the one hand it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack. He came through, and now he’s going to take the events that precipitated him into his heart attack, create a roman à clef around them, and build something magical, which he does. There’s a sort of strange and lovely honesty to it that, the first time I saw it when I was about 15/16 and it was on television, I found arresting, and it’s magic."

"This is another song that we started listening to early on in the studio, we wanted to create a universe similar to 'Hanky Panky Know How'. It's a beautiful song, it's another one where the production is like Death of a Ladies' Man. The chorus is so strange, what does that mean, you know? But somehow he still finds a way to make it beautiful and for whatever reason, that influenced us. “There's also something about the way he delivers it. When he sings it, you feel something - ‘Oh, that's so good! but what's he saying?’ And then you look it up, ‘Hanky Panky Know How’ and you have no idea what it means! Sometimes it’s just about the way things sound and feel. You can say anything as long as it feels good."

"Before the segmentation of TV brought on by cable, I first saw this on one of the UK’s four channels. Back then, you could always stumble upon strange and wonderful movies like this . . . and the whole family would watch. Often this made your enjoyment all the sweeter if a parent or sibling didn’t get it. I watched 3 Women with my first girlfriend and her mother. When the movie finished, the Ma said, “I couldn’t make head or tail of that, but I do know it was sick and perverted.” I said to her, “It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen.” She didn’t much approve of me as a beau for her one and only daughter before we watched the movie, but afterwards she thought I was the anti-Christ."

"A great collaboration—more like a mystical fusion—of Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev. Music takes the most direct route to the heart, but rarely does it have such an insanely rich profusion of imagery hitching a ride to the same destination!! This mad history of Russia’s first czar just gets more ridiculously fascinating and baroque as the minutes mount—and there are lots of absorbing minutes in this pair of films, though not enough for my liking! Eisenstein boldly steps further and further out of his closet—not an easy thing to do in Stalinist times—as he brazenly unfurls, right before old Uncle Joe, ever more strange and massive tapestries. Part III had only just been begun when a fatal heart attack, or something, stayed Sergei’s perfumed hand."

"It was my mother's favourite song. He has one of the smoothest voices in music ever. There's a strange sort of reverb going on there that's also present in 'Blue Velvet' by Bobby Vinton. Subconsciously, some part of me wanted to emulate what my mother found to be romantic. Again at a young age, I found that this was romance. Here was what made the girls smile because he was a huge heart-throb as well. So that early crooning, soft romantic style was a blueprint for us early on. From time to time I dive into it, as it's one of the constellations that's always in the sky for me. In fact, it's always on the radio and played more than Britney Spears or Alicia Keys, but only on oldies stations."