It's the same thing: I would think, "If I can't go out and pull some teenager tonight, maybe I'm no good on stage anymore." And you start to think that you even need it as a motivation. I did, anyway.

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

Well, after Zombie Birdhouse came out, I toured behind it in the fall of 1982, into the spring, and in the summer in the Far East. At that time, I found my work self-referential; it was getting to be rock songs about a rock singer who lived a rock life on the rock road, and I was starting to wonder what I would be like to rent my own apartment, what it would be like to have a checkbook.

I wasn't so stupid that I didn't realize the implications of what they were saying. In my live work I was going for the quick thrill, rather than spending time concentrating on my voice. I figured I'd get on, make as many quick movement as possible, dance my ass off for five minutes, move into the insult portion of the evening, and then, at the end, create some kind of chaos until the 55 minutes were up.

There was a time when I wanted to get out of the Western world. I went down to Grenada and looked at a place, and I realised that if I lived in a Grenadian manner I'd be nothing but a blah. I'm going to need constant bodyguarding, guns and money to join the community there. Otherwise you just got a bunch of fat, old white people dying together, overeating, drinking. Not very attractive.

What the world needs right now... a good, artistic, gothic, terrifying scare

When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial.