‘A year after we broke up, we heard that two bands had started touring the US as the Zombies. One group said they were the originals but with a new singer – because I’d been killed in a car crash’

Our first single, She’s Not There, was one of the first songs I wrote, when I was 18. It remained our only hit in the UK by the time we recorded our second album, Odessey and Oracle, in 1967 – this was only three years later but it felt like a lifetime. We’d recently signed to CBS and had been given £1,000, which even then was not a huge amount of money. We recorded pretty quickly in a few sessions spread over six months, producing ourselves for the first time.

‘When I couldn’t do the spitting scene, Sean took me aside and said: “Ron, if you don’t actually spit in my face, we’ll be here all day.” So I let one fly – and kept having to redo it’

I read an article about a curious book that had great reviews in Italy, a murder mystery about monks in the middle ages fighting for the fictional missing part of Aristotle’s Poetics. I said: “This is for me.” Since childhood, I had been fascinated with medieval and religious architecture, and Aristotle’s Poetics is my favourite literary work.

‘I’d just made two films in America. Shooting on a Lancashire farm was very different. There was mud everywhere – and we’d be eating dripping, jam butties and fried eggs in buns’

Whistle Down the Wind was originally a novel written by my mother, Mary Hayley Bell, about three children living on a farm in Sussex. The children – loosely based on my sister Juliet, my brother Jonathan and myself – discover a man in their barn. Thinking he’s Jesus, they decide to hide him and protect him from the adults because they don’t want the same thing to happen to him as before.

‘In the early days, we hopped on every bandwagon going – punk, ska, mod, everything. Fantastic Day was always there, just in different styles. The original was more Talking Heads. I preferred that’

If I’d been sitting down when I wrote Fantastic Day, it would have been a different song, but I was standing up in front of a chocolate-brown wall with the names of all my favourite punk bands scribbled on it. I was envisioning the future. It was 1978, and my family had moved across London to a place called the Ski Club of Great Britain where my parents ran the bar. We lived in the basement and I had a tiny room that was like a ship’s cabin.

‘The control room buttons were upside-down ice-cube trays, one space suit had a dish-drying rack on it – and the special effects guy wrote the theme tune lyrics’

In 1970, I partnered with Dan O’Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a senior student project. We wanted to make a science fiction movie inspired by Dr Strangelove and 2001. We had no money but we did have enormous ambition. Dan co-wrote it, and he was also its production designer and editor, and he acted in the movie, playing Sergeant Pinback.