"I was a huge Propagandhi fan, and then John K Sampson from Propagandhi left and made a country album and everyone thought it was a bit weird. As I started getting more into the country/folk scene, I went back and revisited them and now they are my favourite band, unquestionably. I will listen to them at any time - I think I might put them on at the end of this interview. I can pick any one of their records, but this is the one that came out when I really started engaging with this scene"

"The Shawshank Redemption. The title threw me at first. Before I went to jail, I started watching [every jail movie]. That was one of them. I was trying to write a book, and I was having trouble. You know, I didn’t have the right publisher; they just wanted a book. I hooked up with this writer, a ghost writer, and he wrote a script for me, like, overnight. It was my story, but told from a bong’s point of view, and the bong gets put in federal prison. A week later the feds come in. There was some weird cosmic thing going on."

"I don’t know how controversial it is in Beach Boys fan circles but I really like the Brother years. It’s as if they’ve all spent years with a genius, learning how to do it, soaking up musical know-how like sponges and then just gone for it themselves. There are some great songs – The Trader is one of my favourites, and Sail On Sailor is one of my wife’s all-time favourite songs. I’m drawn to beauty in music. You can put three chords together and it does something weird to me. It feels a little bit like magic."

"I’m trying to remember records from when I was going through the most teenage, the most angsty periods of my life. I’ve got kids now, I listen to the radio sometimes, a I feel like as a teenager, what are you into? When I was at that age it was Portishead, I remember it soundtracking weird parties I went to where some kids were being more experimental with drugs. I remember it being quite an odd soundtrack to that time. And I think they’re a really brilliant band, one of a few uniquely British propositions, only Britain could produce that kind of group."