"This is a record that has been with me so long because of the hippy environment that I grew up in. When I was 11 or 12, I remember the excitement of hearing this record for the first time. There are a couple of duds on there, and that threw me off a bit. But there are so many amazing songs that show the softer side of Jimi Hendrix - incredible songwriting and more mellow stuff, and these choruses that just explode in a really dramatic way. It also triggers a funny memory for me when I think about this record… My first girlfriend - in grade seven, when I was 12 or 13 - she was the daughter of one of the teachers at the school. She was really into Hendrix and was part of the reason why I got into him. But around the time I got hold of this record, she dropped acid in gym class. She was the first person I knew to drop acid. And then her mum came up to her when she was trying to open her locker - she was the teacher - and started talking to her. I know some people find 'Little Wing' a bit too saccharine, but all those Hendrix ballads make me so nostalgic for that time and all the people that I knew and where I grew up."

"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.”"

"Weirdly, I think Dylan's protest mode never quite 100% rings true to me. It rings 98.5% true, but somewhere, in the back of my mind, there's something inauthentic about it, in some way. And I think he may have felt that. I mean, what's Dylan's best song ever? Probably 'Like A Rolling Stone' and that's just sneering at somebody, a woman he'd been in a relationship with. As a body of work, Blood On The Tracks is faultless, there's not a bum note in there, not a bum word, everything transports you. You know, it's brilliant storytelling, and he's not trying to be too clever. With Blonde On Blonde, which is an album I love, he's trying to make himself come across like a brainiac, talking about Verlaine and French poets, which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that at all, but maybe you feel… I guess he always does that. I suppose Blonde On Blonde is slightly more obscure, slightly more difficult, whereas Blood On The Tracks, he's just storytelling, he just wants to talk about this break-up. I remember being with a girlfriend and her friend, and she said, ""here's the new Dylan thing"" - it draws you in, it immerses you in it and as soon as I started hearing it there was no room for anything else."

"I can't say this about every song on this list, but with this one I was quite aware of what the band were doing when it came out. I wouldn't say Public Enemy are my favourite band, but it's pretty close, and when this record was released, they were the most important group in the world as far as I was concerned. ""They were the most interesting, the most intelligent, and at the time, nobody was more controversial than Chuck D. They were so original; they were breaking new ground with every recording. Before It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, there just wan't music like this. ""That record came out six months before Fear of a Black Planet, and it still felt so sharply of its time because Chuck was talking about everything he'd gone through in the months leading up to it - the controversy with Professor Griff, and everything else. Later on, he said something like, ""Public Enemy is CNN for black people,"" and you get that with this song. It's totally brutal, totally brilliant, and totally of the moment. In the winter of 1990, they just meant everything. ""I've put this one on plenty of mixtapes. Plus, is that a Frankie Goes to Hollywood reference in the title? It's got to be, right?"

"Then the second one – and let’s say, this was in no particular order – but A Man Escaped, the [Robert] Bresson movie. That has to be my favorite movie of all time, just because it always makes me cry at the end, because I feel like I’ve achieved something that the character achieves. And it tells you what happens in the title, and it makes it no less suspenseful the entire way. You’re literally feeling the sound of the gravel as he puts his foot down – those shots of the foot or the spoon going into the slot. All of these things, the editing of it, the character, the way he’s using these actors who you don’t really know, they just – you feel like they’re real people. It’s just so perfectly put together, and it’s something where I kind of feel like I’m going along with the escape in a way that’s just done by a master. In a weird way, I feel like Bresson is the Fontaine character in that movie. But what’s weird is I’ve watched it again recently, and I had a totally different feeling of it, where it was more about society and how people are talking to each other. And then you realize Bresson is just kind of making the same movie every time, just with different [settings and characters]. One’s World War II, one’s Lancelot."

"Then, my last one is going to be — this might be slightly more obscure, though it really shouldn’t be. I fell in love with this film when I first saw it and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film as beautiful, as contemplative. The film After Life by Hirokazu Koreeda. I remember when I first saw it, just being totally blown away by every single frame of it. The honesty of it, the fact that it celebrated life, the fact that it was so unbelievably profound and spoke volumes about living life to the fullest and cherishing every moment. I don’t think there’s been a more beautiful film about life itself. It’s so understated in the way he tells his story. It’s obviously a collection of vignettes and a collection of talking heads, but woven into this narrative. Again, I might be wrong, but I seem to remember that the number of the people who contributed to the experiences of life are real people — it’s almost like documentary-styled elements to the film itself. So you got these really personal memories that are very private. Sometimes they’re nostalgic, sometimes they are beautiful, sometimes they’re funny and amusing. That, for me, is the ultimate win. When the Blu-rays of that came out in Japan, straight away I was like, “I’m buying this film! I need this film in HD.”"