My son is in a band, and he’s a singer, and his vocals … they’re screaming-growling stuff … and he’s got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I’m, like, “Hats off to you.”

I enjoy making solo albums because over the years it's evolved into more of a genuine personal expression of story-telling and day dreams, and I work in a way that has more control.

You can sail in the desert with a ship of fools. You can smuggle in Moses and his book of rules. But you can't take a mother and give her back her son. What kind of freedom is bought with a gun? People like to build their prison walls when they're afraid to look inside... a thousand points of light are the muzzle flashes in the night. And the freedoms you profess to hold won't bring the dead back from the cold.

Anybody auditions for X-Factor it's because they want to be famous, not because they are artists.

I don't have interns. I don't have a manager. I don't have assistants. I don't have a secretary. I can't figure out Outlook Express. I'm the worst person in the world answering e-mails, and my phone is probably the oldest, most battered phone you can find. So I just talk to people.

In the days when Glastonbury was an alternative festival, it was quite interesting. Now it is the most bourgeois thing on the planet ... we'll leave the middle classes to do Glastonbury and the rest of the great unwashed will decamp to Knebworth and drink a lot of beer and have fun.

If it all just happens like this for the rest of my life, it's going to be one endless Groundhog Day. I determined that I was not prepared to submit to this regime, so I thought I had to do something about it.