My mother was a housewife. Both from - well, my father was from a farming family, agricultural family in the north of England. And my mother came from a very working class.

I was studying Tibetan Buddhism when I was quite young, again influenced by Kerouac.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

I ask for so little.Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave

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.

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.

I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.