I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he's up there with Bryan Ferry.

When we decided to marry, we had two ceremonies - one was more bureaucratic for the sake of the Swiss authorities,then a church service in Florence, and I wrote the music for the church service. The challenge in that was that Iman's [Abdulmajid] family are Muslim and mine are Protestant. I had to be careful about the prayers that we chose and the music I wrote because I didn't want to offend either side.

A mutual friend knew that we were both [with Iman Abdulmajid] on our own, with broken marriages and with children. We were brought to dinner one night. . . . It was absolutely instantaneous. I couldn't get her out of my mind . . . sleepless nights - real 18-year-old stuff.

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.

I think it's rather a waste of time endlessly singing the same songs every night for a year, and it's just not what I want to do.

[While] my life started taking on all the problems of addiction. So that took me off into an area where relationships were absolutely impossible to handle on any real level. . . . Even communicating with other people was impossible.

And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.