"This is my favourite Smiths track, with ‘How Soon Is Now?’ a close second. Andy and I had a real shared history with The Smiths when we were growing up. We saw them at Maxwell Hall in Salford in 1986, which is remembered as being this legendary gig now, or so I’m told. The thing is, it really was that good - it’s in my top five gigs of all time. I saw them a lot of times, but there was something about that one, the energy was incredible. I think the place was oversold, so there was already a sort of danger in the air, and there was a sense that you were seeing a very special band at the peak of their powers, because it was just after The Queen Is Dead had come out. I can’t think of anything else that sounds like ‘The Headmaster Ritual’. The guitar tuning that Johnny Marr’s using is weird, so there’s this otherworldly feel to the way it sounds, but in terms of what Morrissey is singing about, that was very much rooted in reality; brutality in schools was still a thing during my upbringing and corporal punishment was still around, so this track in particular really resonated with me. I think any time you get one of the greatest lyricists of all time together with one of the greatest guitarists something special’s going to happen, but for me, ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ is probably the top example of what that band could do."

"I love her music. I toured with her a little bit a few years ago. This album came out after we did that. It's just really beautiful and haunting. There are so many people in the world making songs but there are only a few people doing it so that it all blends together as well as it does here. It doesn't happen that much. Sometimes it's sort of pleasantly off or weird or sometimes it's just awkward but most of the time it's just really boring. But she just does this great job of making it seem effortless and dreamlike and strange. I don't know, it's just really good. The lyrics: sometimes you don't quite hear them but then you do. The harmonies are so great. And she does something that I think I do too: she works with the timbre aspect of the music to affect her enunciation, and that has a lot to do with the success of it. She's moulding the shape of her mouth, almost, to get the sounds that she does. She's choosing to enunciate in this very particular way that is to do with harmonics and that sort of thing. I guess the difference with me maybe is that I'm not so good at having a distinct voice that is consistent throughout my songs; I have trouble with that. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, it's just a different approach. But she's really good at maintaining this consistent voice and I love that."

"Again, I think chronologically, is Blade Runner. It was the movie right after Raiders. And Harrison Ford is, you know, my favorite actor. He just has this… He’s just such a likeable guy. He’s obviously been one of the biggest stars in the last 20, 30 years. But he’s really been underappreciated now. And Blade Runner, to me, was such a cool film. And I know it didn’t do well at the box office, but I saw it opening night. People were expecting a lot because Raiders was the film that had just come out before. I just thought it was so ballsy, you know, especially for Harrison Ford to do this, because it wasn’t an action film, it was more of a noir/science fiction movie. And just that opening sequence of going over Los Angeles and those big fire plumes, and the spinners and the angelic soundtrack, it was just, it was religious. It was like a religious experience. Again, I really got into how they made it. I had already been a fan of Ridley Scott but this really solidified him as one of my favorite directors. Just the mood of that movie, it’s just beautiful. It’s one of those weird movies where I’ve seen all the versions and I actually like the original studio version better. I really love Harrison Ford’s narration. To me it was just kind of classic noir, crime/mystery film, you know? But it was set in this frickin’ crazy science-fiction future and I just loved it."

"This is one of my favourite films, and I’m going to almost insist that you say in this article that people must go and watch a song called Carol Brown, from the new series of Flight of the Conchords. It’s been directed by Michel Gondry, and it’s just so amazing; for the rest of the episode you can’t really see that it’s him, but up comes this dazzling thing. I just think for a movie with such a massive concept, that idea, that sort of fantasy, should be done by being completely realistic. In a way it’s like Let the Right One In – the office where they alter your mind feels like a ghastly dental surgery. So you’re in this weird mixture between something that feels terribly realistic, with Kirsten Dunst jumping up and down on a bed, absolutely normal, and yet it’s completely freakish and odd and had these spectacular special effects in it. I love the sort of downbeat-ness of the love story — the fact that, really, they’re sort of right for each other, but only because they’re not right for anyone else. I think it’s a genuinely great fantasy movie, a great love story, and Kate Winslet‘s hair is, after all, blue, so that’s obviously a good reason for seeing it. You’ve been on this massive ride, and it gets back to these people in a corridor, which I suppose is like — if you land on the moon, there’s just you on the moon, and I think there’s something profound about the whole thing."

"I have a weird relationship with David Bowie. There's a part of me that didn't want to include him out of bloody-mindedness, not out of any disrespect to him but because I get sick of talking about David Bowie, what with all those comparisons we drew. People said that Suede were like a mixture of The Smiths and Bowie, when actually there are all these other comparisons that could have been made. But I can't get away from the fact that he is a huge influence on what I do, and you can't get away from the fact that he simply is one of the greatest artists of all time and he made some of the greatest music of the 1970s, and six or seven unbelievably good records. Low is just one of them, I could have chosen Hunky Dory, Space Oddity, Scary Monsters, Young Americans. But I've chosen Low because I love the mystery of it, even though it's not his best song album - there's no 'Quicksand' or anything like that. You can tell that he's shifting, and looking for something else. My favourite track on it is 'Warszawa', with its amazing Wagnerian stirring in the music. Suede's 'Europe Is Our Playground' had a sense that it was a version of that. I love the way Low doesn't explain itself, and that it's a really odd record. I love the chronology of it, the fact that three of my favourite records ever were all made around the same time: Low, Never Mind The Bollocks and Music For Airports."

"When I was in eighth grade I ran for a student body secretary, or something like that, and all the kids would campaign for a month or so before the elections, putting up posters or whatever. And then on the election day everybody had to give a speech, or have some sort of audio presentation that got played over the school's PA. So there were periods on election day when everyone would be in the home room and you'd have to sit through all these speeches that the 13/14-year-olds were making. And I made my speech using the Deee-Lite tape. I had a double cassette boom box and I would dub different parts of the Deee-Lite tape and mix it up so that it built a speech. I didn't keep it. I feel like it must be in the possession of some member of my family, in a box somewhere. I'd kind of forgotten about that until recently but it turned up in my head recently. Unfortunately I don't really know anyone from that period in my life anymore so there wasn't anybody I could ask about it. I never really put it together that long, long before I had any knowledge of what dance music was, or what sampling or dubbing was I did this thing. But it certainly wasn't cool. I think it confused pretty much everybody in my school. I don't even remember what it said, but I remember feeling very proud of it even though everyone thought I was totally weird and a freak."

"I first heard this on the radio in the car about six months ago. Rarely will anything break my concentration when I’m driving but occasionally I’ll hear something and think ‘Wow, that’s got something’ and make a note of it to listen to later and this sir Was track sounded great. The Lemon Twigs’ record did that, when I heard some of those tracks I really liked the attitude, they’re very stylistic and retro to a degree, but the attitude was real enough to not make it all about the style. “So when I heard ‘In The Midst’ I really liked the beat. When I listen to something I think the sound hits me first and I’ll get into the track later on, where I’ll get into the lyrics and the more I hear it I’ll know the workings of the track, but with that first instinctive listen, I normally hear a bassline or the beat. “There’s a song on World’s Strongest Man called ‘The Oaks’ - I call it ‘The Billie Jean Beat’, it’s a running ‘Billie Jean’ beat with a loop over it - and ‘In The Midst’ has got this Al Green beat to it with these reverbed vocals that are almost like The Flamingos and The Shangri-Las. I listened to more of the sir Was record and it’s quite a weird record actually, there’s some great moments and then there’s some stuff I’m not so into, but I definitely like the attitude and the sound on this track. Sonically ‘In The Midst’ is up my street, it’s really cool."