Playing and singing at the same time is pretty cool, but sometimes it's difficult to know when you can just really let go a bit because you've got to get back to bloody microphone and sing some stuff.

It's the faster bands that made me want to play guitar, bands like The Jam.

With my daughter, who at the time was one, my domestic life needed to take more precedent and really with my own self I needed to develop quite a bit more. So that put Blur down the list of priorities quite a lot by the time I came to thinking about it.

Like, Mission Of Burma to me always sounded almost like they were part of the British Arty New Wave. I kind of like that. I like not being able to tell the difference.

A singer for me is more like someone who is standing alone with a microphone like Scott Walker, rather than someone who is bashing a plank and is spitting all over a microphone.

I've always looked at shoes as being immensely beautiful things.

You know Manchester is always a bit of a hard place for people coming from London, just with all the history. Manchester has this immensely huge and healthy history musically.