Let's divert from music to film.

English director Nicolas Roeg, 90 years old, died this week. He made weird, evocative films that seriously messed up my youth. I've always been hugely grateful.

Roeg started as a clapper boy in the early 1950s, eventually working his way up to filming several 1960s classics including Fahrenheit 451, Far From the Madding Crowd and Petulia.

His move to directing came in 1970 with the cult favourite Performance, which he helmed along with Donald Cammell and which gave Mick Jagger his first starring film role.

He then made a series of films through the 1970s that marked him as pretty much the most exciting modern English director of the time.

There was ground-breaking outback adventure The Walkabout (1971) and perhaps his towering achievement, 1973's Don't Look Now. A psychological horror based on a Daphne Du Maurier story, the film is set around Venice's claustrophobic alleyways and contained a sex scene of such honest purity (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) that it is still regularly cited in lists as one of the ten most erotic ever lensed.

Musicians

Roeg liked casting musicians in lead roles and next up was David Bowie's iconic turn as the alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth, followed by Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing (1980) - the disturbing story of a toxic love affair notorious for its convention-shattering sexual core.

That was the glory period for Roeg. But he made a lot of other worthy films: Eureka (1983) starred Gene Hackman; Insignificance (1985) is very good; and Oliver Reed got a vigorous outing in Castaway (1986). Later films were weaker and had limited release, though The Witches (1990), based on a Roald Dahl story, is deliciously wicked fun.

Amongst other things that made Roeg so special was his ability to make cinema work simultaneously on various levels, with stories just springboards for emotional and intellectual exploration. He often used cut-up time - flashbacks and flash-forwards - before drawing together seemingly elusive strands for a climax forging unexpected transcendental connections.

The final devastating reveal in Don't Look Now connects glimpses threaded throughout the film for a horrific revelation that is only so powerful because the couple's relationship is so genuine and real.

As a teen watching these films it was the transgressive artistic daring that attracted me. Now I find myself equally impressed by the honesty in their unblinking examination of human imperfection.