I don't mean I give the same intensity to everything I do - if I did that, I'd be dead, but I'm very conscious, I make notes, and I have a fairly good idea of what's happening in my life.

I was at a time of my life of making choices, I suppose: am I a writer, am I a visual artist? And when I was a teenager. I thought I would be a film-maker. Am I a musician? If so, what kind of musician am I?

Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art.

We drank quite a lot and Tony Harrington said, "We're thinking of starting a record label at The Wire; how about you do a solo record?" I said, "Well, how am I going to do that?" I thought about it, and I'd been working on a lot of music in the years before, and I was working as a journalist, full time, really, up until that point; in whatever little spare time I had, I was working on music. So I said yes.

People don't have to put you in a box. You can have the confidence to move across, and combine and learn from each different practice. They inform each other.

I needed a huge amount of energy to cope with my life. I had a huge amount of energy where stuff was concerned: it was as if all this unconscious material had been unleashed.

Sound: always in a state of emergence or decay