Tony Visconti and I had been wanting to work together again for a few years now. Both of us had fairly large commitments and for a long time we couldn't see a space in which we could get anything together.

Actually, my ambition at eight or nine years old was to be one of Little Richard's sax players, and that's when I got my first saxophone, a Selmer. It was a strange Bakelite material - that creamy plastic with all the gold keys on it. I had to get a job as a butcher's delivery boy to start paying for it.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It's because I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.'

The younger people get into the lyrics in a different way; there's much more of a tactile understanding, which is the way I prefer it.

I think everything that I learned about stagecraft and carrying through - creating a through point for a theatrical device.

Let the children use it, let the children lose it, let all the children boogie.

I don't like people probing into my life, so I reveal as little as possible or lie about it as much as need be so as to give them something to write about.