"I went there this rather backwards, lazy, dreamy, um, idiot really, and I found out so much – all sorts of European films, modern art, books that seemed to have been written with me especially in mind. But at the same time, I was there in the late eighties and the town itself was very run-down, depressed, violent at the edges. It was the era of Thatcher and the Poll Tax, and there was real anti-student, anti-English feeling – so there I was, feeding my head with all these incredible arty things, and there was this working-class town mired in depression and unemployment, an almost overwhelming sense of greyness and lethargy. And this was a source of real tension... I was watching a lot of European movies – all the New Wave films, especially Truffaut who's also quite light-hearted about very sad things – and reading a lot of East European fiction too – the late eighties were a golden age for translated fiction from the old Soviet bloc, what with the wall about to fall. Thus I loved all those Czechs – Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, especially Bohumil Hrabal – who took depressing Soviet reality and transformed it into something surreal, playful and alive."〔http://www.ylolfa.com/alc-newpage-sleepwalkers-ball-twenty-questions.php〕