I think that's one of the problems with downloading mps these days. You never really get a chance to attune to a different logic, a different musical logic. If you hear a song and don't like it, you'll just delete it off your hard drive.

John [Lennon] as a singer - the way he sings on "Twist and Shout" and the way he sings on "Strawberry Fields Forever" - is a very odd voice, in the sense that it seems to be celebrating but almost mourning at the same time. There's a quality of mourning to his voice, which is very enigmatic.

Folk songs in general, I like. The old spooky Scottish folk songs.

One of the great things about being in a band is that you meet so many other musicians who will turn you on to stuff you would never have otherwise found out about.

I have the longing that all writers have for new ears to pour my words into.

There's nobody on a normal income who can afford to live anywhere centrally, so everything becomes displaced and decentralized. The city [of London] becomes incongruent. It doesn't have any coherence anymore.

I think the music that's part of your heritage is what you spend a lot of your early life rejecting. The very idea of folk music would break me out in hives until I was about 28. But I think it's nice when you eventually do come back to it. It's like coming home, and you realize it wasn't so bad after all.