You can only begin to be great when you embrace a sense of your own ridiculousness.

Glasgow's not a media center. When you're there, when you're hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. You do feel quite alone, in a good way.

The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

People's musical tastes are fickle, and music can be a fashion.

Why play a chord when you can play one note?

Just because you can leap off a drum kit doing a scissors kick while hitting a chord, people expect you to be an extrovert socially. But I'm not always comfortable with the idea of small talk at a party.

For me upward social mobility is possible through talent and hard work and is a glowing endorsement of the benefits of living in a modern capitalist society. It's not so much evidence of a meritocracy, as evidence of healthy nepotism. Nepotism is at the core of a good group dynamic. A good group dynamic is at the core of rock'n'roll.