It's hard to avoid the past but one goes forward.

If you're 20 years old, you've grown up without buying albums.

It is not very practical in today’s world when you tour all over the place having a big band.

You're on the stage and you've got all those people yelling at you, so you better be right in the moment, reacting to that. It's completely live and organic. Even 20 years later, it's the same thing. You may be even better on your instrument. Hopefully, you are.

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.

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.

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.