You can experience a download, but you can't download an experience.

The idea that musicians should be talking about politics is, in some ways, quite a sixties' idea. Music no longer has a vanguard role in youth culture.

A nation with their freezers full are dancing in their seats, while outside another nation is sleeping in the streets.

A virtue never tested is no virtue at all.

I don't mind being labeled as a political songwriter. I've chosen to do that. What really annoys me is being dismissed as a political songwriter. That really pains me, because life isn't all about love; it's not all about politics, either. It's a beautiful mixture of events that absolutely baffle you, and you think, "Why can't I do something about that?", whether those events are in your bedroom, or out there in the wide world. In our daily lives we engage with them at different times, and I'm trying to write about the whole human experience, or my perspective on it anyway.

I'm still batting away on my politics for the Labour Party. I'm much further to the left of them than I used to be, but that's because they've moved, not me.

Don't saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.