The French are useless. They can't organize a piss-up in a brewery.

Ask anyone. If it hadn't been for Elvis, I don't know where popular music would be. He was the one that started it all off, and he was definitely the start of it for me.

And the stigma hasn't really changed that much in 31 years. You are still getting people - it's a shame-based disease. It's based on sexual transmission. And it's still shame-based. And until people feel strong enough and feel loved enough to actually open up and say, listen, I'm HIV-positive, then we are facing an uphill battle.

I loathe celebrity. I can't stand it.

You know, it's a very treatable disease. You shouldn't feel ashamed. But I'm afraid that's carried on very much so from the first days of AIDS, when it was basically a gay disease. And then, of course, you know, it affected everybody.

Dave and I as a couple seem to be the acceptable face of gayness, and that's great. I've got to use that power to try and do what I can - or we have - to try to make the situations in Russia and Poland better.

I was incredibly confident on stage because that's where I loved to be. But offstage, there was no balance. I was a little shy kid that went onstage. And I always said, cocaine was the drug that made me open up. I could talk to people. But then it became the drug that closed me down. So it started out by making me talk to everyone, and then ended up by me isolating myself alone with it; which is the end of the world, really.