I've got four or five records in my head at a time that I try to work on and I would like to do a guitar trio record next - since The Police I've mostly made records with keyboards.

Sometimes, literally within a few minutes, you'd be off this amazing roaring scene and back at your hotel room, staring at the patten of the wallpaper. It's very surreal. You're back in your room, and it's dead quiet and really weird.

It's exciting to see if you can create something that sounds, at least to your own ears, exciting.

There is always the working out of things, and you have to have sort of a gut response to it. And an intellectual response. And an aesthetic response. All that comes from having done this for a long time. Instead of saying, "That's a really good rock track, and that will do," I'm looking for something that is more original and fresh. There are a lot of elements to get into it: a level or sophistication, passion and excitement.

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.

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

Coming from the era of vinyl you could argue that everything went wrong in the music business the moment we went digital. The day the first CD came out, it all went downhill in the music industry. Digital destroyed everything.