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.

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.

One of the things about grief - I wouldn't generalise, because everybody responds to tragedies in different ways - but I had a huge amount of energy.

I do still have dips of confidence or [can think] everything I do is rubbish.

I think I was like [a game of] skittles, knocked apart by this wooden ball, and there's a strength to that: you're not too self-conscious about what you're doing, so you're not too worried about it.

Sound: always in a state of emergence or decay