I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.

You don't want to be so far off the planet that you come out with something that doesn't make sense to anybody.

Start with the titles, and then build the music that goes with them.

If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.

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.

Of course the playing is important but writing and the establishing of what you are going for is prime too.

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.