I was very lucky, because when I was at school, I had a great music teacher who would just take out these free-jazz records and play them for me. So it was in my early teens that I started to listen to jazz.

It's very interesting to read why Cornelius Cardew became disenchanted with academic avant-garde music. He wanted to reach as many people as possible and change their consciousness. He wanted to reach the "working classes" in England. The kind of music he was making was very much from the academy, even though it had a lot in common with things like free jazz and improvisation, and he felt that it was the music of the elite, and that he wasn't really speaking to the people.

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.

When you're in a daze - whether it's from running or a hangover or whatever else - I think that ideas from your subconscious can slip through more easily. The way that I write songs, for what its worth, when I'm playing music, if it's good music it will bring images forward into my mind and then I'll write down what the images are and that becomes the lyrics. I think that process is just easier if the superego has just gone away in disgust for the day.

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.

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