When you're doing a deal with someone in the southern Sahara, it's a very different way of doing business than in London. You can't sign them in the usual way because they'd end up getting ripped off, which would defeat the object of setting up a label like this

Being in Blur has allowed me to travel and hear the music that's being made all over the world.

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.

Change terrifies people. They like new, but they don't like new with change.

A lot of Gorillaz songs were very personal. I mean, that's why it was interesting, because it wasn't music being made for a cartoon. It was something different. It was a much more emotional affair. I wasn't necessarily thinking in the third-person then.

I used to be younger than my producers but now I'm older than my producers and I think that works for me, that works better cause you get a good kick up the ... everyday.

The things that make me happy most are my family and working.