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

What I wanted to do was play the guitar but I don't like instrumental rock. I think it is tripe.

I don't like playing standards. I like to do my own cutting edge work.

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.

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.

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

I don't go out much to see bands. I prefer to be on stage.