There's a sense of trajectories that are extraordinary about a life like this. You can reconnect with people and go back to playing with them after years and years of not even knowing if they're alive.

Every time when it comes to writing a book, I think, "I'm the last person in the world that should be doing this, I don't know anything, I can't do this." And I went through years of that with Into The Maelstrom.

I'd been listening to African-American music since the first record I ever bought, which was by Sam Cooke. And it sounds more like my private thoughts that I never thought I would be able to articulate - I never thought I would be able to express publicly.

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.

If I'd thought, "I can't really play this instrument," I wouldn't have done it! But I didn't care, you know. I didn't care!

I'd just written the book Ocean Of Sound, and this terrible thing happened in my life: my wife committed suicide. I was a single parent because of that; I was completely shattered. I had a book that I'd just finished that had been produced through a really, really terrible period, but I had managed to finish it.

I was working in, being a single parent with a grieving child of five years old. It was horrendous. I couldn't go out much, because I had my daughter to look after. So people used to come round, and Tony Harrington from The Wire came round.