Novels may have taken care of the emotional business for me, which has allowed music to be more emotional for me.

With me more than anybody it seems silly having a stage name, and there wasn't any particular difference between me and John Wesley Harding. There wasn't any need to draw that line. I just happened to draw it.

I took the name originally as a kind of disguise because I didn't want people to know I was about to embark on a s****y musical career that would last five months. And a lot of people took funny names back then.

The people you might lose are the people who look at a marquee and are like, "Oh, John Wesley Harding is playing. I went to see him play 20 years ago." But if they see Wesley Stace, they might make absolutely no link between those two things at all.

I just love putting on a show. I get a tremendous sense of community out of it.

When I was writing this new bunch of songs, I was singing a lot lower, because they were more intimate in a way. I had to come up with a way to frame the music that was intimate.

If they'd said, "Do you want to be John Wesley Harding or Wesley Stace in 25 years' time?" I would have said Wesley Stace, but I wasn't to know.