"This was from college and Charles had it, and obviously I knew those songs. Jimmy Page and [John] Bonham and John Paul Jones did the arrangements to this song, 'Hurdy Gurdy Man'. Fucking hell man! That's epic! Also, I like the sensibility of basically saying "fuck you", well, not fuck you, but it was the freedom of the 70s - I know 'I Love My Shirt' isn't on that album but I just love that, it was like, "Wow, what kind of freedom can you get talking about your favourite goddamn shirt!" And washing it in the stream! And he'll say, "Know what I mean?" [laughs] There's a song there, 'Sunshine Superman', and I played it for Charles and he went, "Shit!" It's so strange. It took me a while, it's got - [imitates guitar] - it's got all these weird sonic spots, it's more sonic really than the melody, because the melody there, what is that?"

"This is a really obscure one, but there’s a really weird French-Canadian movie called Leolo. Roger Ebert loved it. He gave it a four-star review when it came out. The filmmaker, Jean-Claude Lauzon… He made two movies and then he died. It’s a really tragic story. It’s this surreal, messed-up story about a kid whose family is going insane, and so he comes up with these fantastical stories to escape from his world. I saw that movie when I was in high school, and it just made such an impression on me because of the way it balanced humor and absurdity, and surrealism, and then just tragedy. It’s great. I should probably see it again. I haven’t seen it in a couple of years, so I want to make sure it still stands up. That movie is another very particularly strange coming-of-age movie that will always be a reference for me."

"The strange thing about Altamont, with all its horrors—brilliantly and intimately documented by the Maysleses and by Stanley Booth in his book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones—is that one still wishes one had been there. (I interviewed Stanley onstage in 2012 after a screening of the film, and he still seemed traumatized by the gig, all these years later.) The film and Booth’s book can both be usefully cross-referenced with Sonny Barger’s autobiography, in which he concedes that while it may have been a big night for the Stones it was just another night for the Angels! One of the great moments in documentary is when we focus on Barger at the edge of the stage, looking at Jagger as though he might still decide to beat the crap out of him, as no one had looked at him since he was a little boy at school in England."

“Very apt for now, because I think it’s just come out on DVD. I’m scared of horror films, and hardly ever see them, but I was just so haunted by the scene at the end at the swimming pool, about which I will say no more because my brain is still trying to work out what happened there. It just shows how, if you’ve got a really low budget, and a really serious intent, you can make people feel uncomfortable. It’s a weird, spooky, melancholy Swedish love story about vampires, which is a big subject at the moment, but it’s hard to imagine a better vampire film. So that would be my number one choice — delightful, strange and disjointing. “That will be the only horror movie on any list of mine. The first time I saw The Exorcist, I had to sleep with the lights on for about four years, so horror is not for me.”

"It's an overlooked record I think. They were in the midst of breaking up. They were writing separately, and here you can really tell the differences between the Lennon–McCartney and George Harrison songs. What I find really interesting about the record is how it's not really polished. 'Glass Onion' is as unique a song as I've ever heard, and with self-reference: 'I told you about Strawberry Fields', 'the walrus was Paul'; I mean all that stuff! It refers to things the fans were talking about. It's a spectacular album. It doesn't connect like Abbey Road or Let It Be anywhere near as fast because the songs are all over the place. In the days when album covers and packaging meant so much, it was just a brave statement to say it doesn't have a title and leave it white. There is no title anywhere on the record, that's fantastic! Just the solo photos of the band inside. It's a strange record."