"The Kinks, like The Who, are one of those quintessentially great English singles bands but I’ve listened to this album so many times and I just fucking love it. It’s obviously such a big influence on Damon Albarn’s writing. You know the song ‘Big Sky’? 'Big sky, too big to cry.' You can almost hear someone shouting 'Parklife!' at the end of it, do you know what I mean? On the opening track you’ve got the lyrics mentioning all the strawberry jam, Fu Manchu, Mrs Mop and all this quintessentially English stuff, and when I started getting older so I was listening to records not just feeling them it suddenly hit me, 'These lyrics are fucking outrageous. How do you get all that stuff in there and make it work?' The album is incredible. I’ve got an old album of interviews with Ray Davies and he was saying that he thought it was important that we keep all of this traditional stuff like afternoon tea, cricket and cucumber sandwiches alive because American culture was taking over the world but he couldn’t imagine it taking over England. But then you realise… oh shit… it did. What a cunt. What a cunt. It took ages to come out because of legal shit, got delayed for three years and then no one bought it. I presented him with an award a few years ago and I thought, now’s my chance to get to know more about the writing of such a great album. So I was like, 'So Village Green, tell me about this great album…' And he’s grumpy at the best of times and just went: [snaps] 'Oh, I don’t know.' I was like, 'Ok, good to get that one sorted out finally. Nice to meet you.'"

"OK so number five is sort of topical because at the moment I’m in the midst of pre-production to start this western that I’m about to make. So number five is Unforgiven. For me, Unforgiven is a great film and it’s a great traditional sort of American western, and it’s a great critique about an older guy whose past is very different than who he is now. Being dragged into his past is complicated, even down to the details that it’s hard for him to get on his horse again. It’s a western that deals with violence in a very unique way in that it’s one of the only westerns where you get to see the ramifications and the accountability of violence. You see how it affects people. And you see how some people are capable of it and some people are not, and the people that act like they are often times are not, and I think those are really important, complicated issues in this genre that is known for glorifying violence. I think it’s a really brilliant take on that. I also think that it’s a very good representation of the culmination of someone’s career. If you can define Clint Eastwood in a nutshell — him as an actor, and him as a director — he’s older when he made this movie, but you can really see that he’s figured everything out, and then he made this movie. It’s an example of all that stuff being figured out, and it’s just done so masterfully. I think that’s a credit to him and the time he spent making westerns or films in general as both an actor and a director. There’s a control of that film that is really unlike many other westerns and it’s very inspirational."