When I've finally got the title, I think, "Okay, yes, now I know where we are. Now I know what it is. Fine, that must be finished or nearly finished.

If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.

Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.