"A beautiful film about Charlie Parker, played brilliantly by Forest Whitaker, and directed by an actor who’s obviously a big jazz fan. Bird really shows you how ludicrously gifted Parker was, how his mind worked on a completely different level, but also how much he got lost in self-loathing, and how addiction made everything fall apart. Parker was 34 when he died, but the coroner thought he was 60, looking at his body. By getting into the New York club scene and looking at aspects of racism, this film also shows just how much Parker achieved, given everything he was fighting against."

"I would say five would probably have to go The Color Purple, Steven Spielberg’s film, which obviously deals with racism but also deals with a lot of human emotions. Everything from abuse, controlling husbands, abusive parents to family life. Just so much emotion. The music is incredible — Quincy Jones did an incredible job on the soundtrack. The vocalists on the soundtrack were staggering. And the performances by Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, I mean just some of the best performances ever put on screen. Eloquently and beautifully directed by Steven Spielberg — I think, actually, his best work."

"I saw Culture live. Dub reggae was one of the main things I would listen to, so seeing them live was great! We may have been on the bill with them or something, I can't remember. I think we might have done a big Rock Against Racism gig in Finsbury Park at the Rainbow. And Culture played at that. There was a band called… I know The Jam came and did a few numbers before Gang Of Four. It's all a vague. I think we took the rhythmic nature of the lyrics and the way they fitted around the music was very key, very influential."

"Istanbul, London, Madrid, Boston…ever since my childhood I lived in numerous countries. One of the downsides of a nomadic life is that you can never keep a proper library. At some point, I had boxes of books in Istanbul, waiting to be shipped, boxes of books in Arizona. You have to let go of even your most beloved possessions when you live a peripatetic life, but there was one author whose voice I could never do without: James Baldwin—the observer, the commuter, the rebel. Notes of a Native Son is a collection of essays about language, racism, hatred, and ultimately, resilience and dignity."

"I believe this track had a lot of political resonance in the late ‘70s. I don’t know what the impact was at the time, because I was too young - I would’ve been about seven years old. It’s so articulate and compelling; it’s one of the most powerful pieces of lyricism to have come out of the twentieth century. “One of the biggest clichés that I despise is when guys who write lyrics for their band describe themselves as poets - it’s usually the most absurd affectation. With Linton Kwesi Johnson though, you have the opposite, a genuine poet who is putting his words to music. It’s really powerful sonically, too - Dennis Bovell’s production is astonishing and the record just really kicks. The words aren’t just believable, but completely empathetic. When he’s describing blows raining down on his friend and his reaction, it’s like you’re there with him. It’s like stepping into a movie or a really good book and watching the hero right in front of you. Very few songs pull that off as well as this one does. “I’d always listened to reggae growing up, but I didn’t hear this song until I was nineteen or twenty. I shared a flat, for a long time, with a guy from Ghana who was a big Linton Kwesi fan, and it was him who played me the record first. When I was growing up in the ‘80s, the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain didn’t really have much of a voice in the general media, so this record still felt relevant ten or fifteen years later when I finally heard it. “I was just talking to my sister the other day about the racism we saw going on at school. We went to the same one, this really ordinary comprehensive in Glasgow, she’s ten years younger than me and yet we saw similar things. It wasn’t even casual racism - it was often really active racism through which people identified themselves. There were school desks with NF scrawled on them, and some of the language that was thrown about was pretty appalling. It made this song all the more powerful when I first discovered it."