I do find that most fans are aware of my writing career and have known my real name for many years.

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 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.

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.

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

If somebody had said to me back in 1988 that I'd still be making music in 25 years' time, to start with I would have keeled over with shock because I wouldn't have believed them.

The only problem with conjuring people is they insist on getting paid, unlike a writer who would do a reading for nothing.