In the time of Mrs Thatcher the church, to give it its due, spoke out and was an enemy of the Conservative government.

I grew up in the church, with traditional hymns, but at the same time I was beginning to listen to pop music, the mid-60s, The Beatles, which had just as much influence on me as those hymns did. Then the hippy stuff like Pink Floyd started to raise questions about how I lived my life and the world in which I lived.

John Moncur has been much more effective since he came on

The bible is not a blueprint for every day of your life, it is an inspiration not a blueprint. That requires that we listen to one another and get challenged and grow by living with difference within the body of the church.

I've never really separated out the spiritual and the secular.

The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.

Spirituality is a natural part of ourselves, as natural as emotions, but we've got all the language wrong and made this divide between secularism and spirituality, whereas instead it's about being human.