For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.

If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.