I was naive enough to believe it would be enough to replace the government. Well, I made fun of the people in the government and then realized that even if we got rid of them, they were replaced by exactly the same guys.

Music is something that should speak for itself, straight from the heart. It took me a long time to understand that.

I'm an English songwriter/composer, working in Mandarin and trying to find something about Chinese culture that I really relate to and respect and feel some genuine emotions for - and it's quite hard, the pentatonic scale, and that, in a way, is why I think it works. Because I'm forced to limit myself to quite strict rules about what I did. Maybe that's how I avoided pastiche.

My guaranteed way of sending myself into deep depression is to read music trade papers and watch MTV.

There's need to be some sort of disturbance in your psyche for creativity to be sparked.

Well, as resources inevitably disappear [in Africa], people have to make do with a lot less. You have to be much more ingenious with a lot less, and accept that you can't get your perfect tuna sandwich on a street corner.

I'm slightly ambivalent to the whole relationship between the whole advertising world and music. I think sometimes it works and sometimes it's a really bad mismatch. I think on this occasion its fine because the iPod is like your own mini-library and that can't be a bad thing. It promotes eclecticism and that's very much what we are about so it's a good relationship.