I wanted all the music to sound strong. It's all down to the restoration and mastering. In many ways I feel the work in general was never properly mastered in the first place. To me, making the music sound the way we wanted it was by far my biggest goal with the re-issues.

Our language was even taken from us. The Irish Gaelic language was outlawed and the religion was outlawed. Hence the religion later being stronger; stronger to a negative point of view. But our venge was, I mean if you listen to Irish language, it's very complicated but it's very poetic.

Music and books were my inspiration too. I read avidly as a kid. And that's the beautiful thing about books and music and even movies, is that you can actually escape. You can go into other worlds.

I like a fine wine. Who can beat that? I don't think it helps writing; I think it's a hinderance. It helps numb you.

I've always as a performer on stage tend to sort of throw myself into the character, whatever I've written about, so it depends on how I'm writing or what I'm writing about.

My heroes are all dead. I've lots of heroes. My mum is a hero. She had to put up with me and my dad. She is one of my heroes. Some of my friends are heroes. There are so many. But heroes usually let you down, don't they? There is people I admire, people I respect.

I really disliked the fact that our Irish culture is what make us and made us and will make us. And when money came in, we rejected it so quickly. Not even rejected, we didn't think. We just got lazy and all the girls started getting fat and that's not good is it.