I'm gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones.

My work is really the accumulation of these different moods that I've had throughout my life and where they've taken me. I start looking back, and I think, I've actually created a life out of all this, out of these changes of mood. They've pushed me through all these years, and I seem to have a semblance of a life, and if I look very carefully, I can see some thematic design to it. There's some continuity.

I guess a certain contingent of the musicians in London at the beginning of the '70s were fed up with denim and the hippies. And I think we kind of wanted to go somewhere else.

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

My son's full real name is Duncan Zowie Haywood. As a toddler he was called by his second name Zowie. But it was such an identifiable name during the Seventies that if I called him loudly in public places, everyone would turn to stare, so I started calling him Joey to take the pressure off. It has the same sound and number of syllables as Zowie. And Joe stuck for most of his childhood. Now he has reverted to his real name, Duncan. Haywood was my father's name.

It's true - I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me.

I'm a phallus in pigtails, and there's blood on my nose, and my tissue is rotting where the rats chew my bones. And my eye sockets empty, see nothing but pain, I keep having this brainstorm about twelve times a day.