Ambition is sneered at by some bands. It seems like a pretty good thing to me.

If success had come along when I was 17 it would either have killed me or sent me completely mad.

You really only understand whether a song's good or not when you properly play it out in public for the first time.

I really want it to have an impact on the world. I want to be in a town on the other side of the world, and somebody walks up and says, 'That music you made in Glasgow, I listened to it every day, and it moved me.'

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 internet is like a gossipy girls' locker room after school, isn't it?

There's a character that I play onstage, and I can't let him loose in the supermarket when I'm buying my beans on toast.