Commercial record has never interested me. It's amazing I was in a band like The Police that had such phenomenal commercial success. Part of what made The Police what it was was that we didn't all come in with obvious mainstream musical tastes. We were a rock band and somehow we had to make rock music, but it was informed by a lot of things outside of the mainstream for sure.

Actually, I think my hands are in the best shape they've ever been in terms of what I can do.

What you aim for, in the first place, is to be as good as you can possibly be. This is what I do, and I'm going to try to be the best in the world.

I think we are coming to a new era where people will record much faster.

The most obvious thing you can't do with a guitar synthesizer is to really sound like a guitar.

There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

You come off of this screaming audience of many, many thousands of people. I used to find it very weird. You have two choices. Either you can stay and pump flesh with hundreds of people after the show, which really gets old, or you can come off stage, get into the car, and go straight out the back and away, back to the hotel.