We're in a situation now where we've got five long-play records of sort of eerie psychedelic pop music. I don't think that we can make another one. That's really my position on it. If we were to do a film soundtrack or something else where I could take the rest of the band with me. I really don't think bands should make more than five records anyway. In fact, five is one too many. We'll have to see how it pans out.

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.

Cornelius Cardew's folk songs were very, very literal, and they were just about workers smashing their chains. It was like reading Das Kapital over a folk-song melody, and it's a spectacular failure, in my opinion.

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

I remember the period in the 1980s where the Beatles were terminally uncool, and it seemed to me then like they were just my little secret, and the rest of the world didn't know anything about them.

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.

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.