I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.

Prog-rock and concept records and some ambitious projects were kind of anathema post-punk. They were destroyed with the advent of punk rock. You don't necessarily need to have a degree in music composition to play in a rock band anymore, which is a great thing.

We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.

No-one wants to hear anything spoken in earnest anymore, unless it happens to involve unrequited, teenage love.

It was a nice relief to be able to work on individual songs.

Music has been already devalued by the consumer. There's an expectation that it should be free so the race to the bottom has already been won.

I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.