I had no balance in my life. I was this one person onstage and this person offstage, who really didn't know much about living.

Fame attracts lunatics.

I've been following him since Space Oddity. And I've followed him from all those albums that didn't sell, like The Man Who Sold The World and things like that. Above all, apart from all the glamorous rubbish, the music's there. Ziggy Stardust is a classic album.

What record companies do these days is drain the blood dry of an album, take six singles off it, and harm the longevity of artists' careers by doing it.

I've got to think about what I'm going to say very carefully. There's two avenues of thought: Do you stop everyone going, ban all the artists coming in from Russia? But then you're really leaving the men and women who are gay and suffering under the antigay laws in an isolated situation. As a gay man, I can't leave those people on their own without going over there and supporting them. I don't know what's going to happen, but I've got to go.

Well, I'm a huge fan of Ryan Adams, who's from North Carolina. And he's beginning to break really quite big.

At heart I've always been a music fan. That part of me has never changed since I was a little kid, sitting in a room watching a record go round, looking at the colour of the labels.