I guess I've always had such an identity crisis when it comes to other people's understanding of me. I don't feel it in myself but from an outsider's point of view, I can see they must be thinking, "Who the hell does this guy think he is?" But recently I've been thinking, okay, a white guy can't sing soul, but would a black person be made exempt from singing opera because it's not a tradition that belongs to them? It's the same kind of argument.

It always happens around beach resorts, a certain kind of money gravitates to the scene. The gold goes to the water. People love to wear it, show it off, roll with it. For me, I just find it disgusting.

You have to sit with the songs until they start to live. Or do things straight-up spontaneously. I set up a beat just like I do in the live show, add the lyrics that I wrote in thirty minutes - I already had a topic in mind because I had this crazy experience with this girl who was trying to get close to me and it freaked me out because she was really close to another friend of mine, and I thought, "This is a story, I'm gonna make this into a song."

If a shop has a lot of sections I'll end up putting my record above the James Blunt CDs since he ripped off my bloody artwork and he's selling millions of records! I try to get people to buy mine accidentally.

I just wanted to have some songs I could stand behind, and when I'm on stage just be loving it. People ask me why I did that and I think perhaps it's because Berlin is quite a gray place and I needed to sympathize with a bit of sunshine.

People can rock together, people can do great things together, and that's what you love when you're working with characters and it's all going well.

I just throw myself into a mad frenzy, whip up a storm and see what comes through.