"For a myriad of different reasons. It’s the ultimate group of lawless action buddy movies. They have all spawned from this. Every sort of two handed buddy movie as The A-Team and — it all comes from this one film: Seven Samurai. It gave Hollywood a genre. Not only did it influence the western genre very obviously, with Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, but every genre of outsider, loner, anti-hero. The character played by Toshiro Mifune, that’s the quintessential character in Hollywood. You’ve seen it played by Montgomery Clift. You’ve seen it played by James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro. They’ve all been influenced in some way by that one character that appears in the Seven Samurai. The wildness. The gregariousness. The mad genius. The outsider. The survivor. Of course, you know the film is an incredibly, beautifully shot film. Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest writers of all time. It speaks for itself. I’ve seen it well over a hundred times. But years ago. 20 years ago — possibly the first. Maybe even 25 years ago was the first time I saw it. An extraordinary movie."

"This got quite mixed reviews when it came out [in 2012], but I think it's really affecting. The guy had colon cancer, and when this album is great – I don't love all of it, but I love a lot of it – it's like an old man's reckoning. It's full of apologies and remorse, but still the old Bobby Womack is in there. There's still some disdain, but he's also quite sad, as he knows he's at the end of his life. I love how he sings those lines in 'Please Forgive My Heart': ""I'm a liar/I'm in a dream…"" It's a performance miles away from the swagger of an album like The Poet, which was perhaps his greatest ever record, in 1980. I remember he was seen as the godfather of contemporary soul back then – he got an album of the year in the NME around that time too [for 1984's The Poet II]. But on this record, he's this disjointed elder, and he's also someone else. He's standing in this fragmented terrain of 21st century soul music, this great survivor in a sci-fi movie. What a way to approach the end of your life."