The best way to get to know Africa is to go there and see what it is. To know somewhere that crazy and that magnificent, you have to spend some time among people, the rhythm of their lives.

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.

I was approached by Oxfam to go to Mali as their ambassador and get involved in their various initiatives out there. But I felt that was missing the point of using me, a musician

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

The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change you ideas, change your face, you know?

The best way to get to know Africa is to go there and see what it is. To know somewhere that crazy and that magnificent, you have to spend some time among people, the rhythm of their lives.

I used to go to work and take heroin in the studio and then stop when I came home.