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.

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 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.

I do like that idea that music can work on two levels, and you only pick up on the second one after a few listens.

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

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.

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.