I have a lot of experience in playing all sorts of venues. And one of my interests is to understand what constitutes the vibe of a place and what makes one concert different from another. You can't fully measure or calculate these things, yet they are absolutely evident once you're on stage.

I don't want to copy the people I admire - I'd rather find out what inspired them and try to find my own way through it.

Sometimes language is not enough.

There actually had been a tradition within English music of the '60s of people looking eastwards, maybe in quite a naïve way, but nonetheless, you had musicians like George Harrison or Bryan Jones recording the musicians of Joujouka in North Africa.

Going to Morocco was massive; that's where I really found music which had the African syncopation and swing mixed with Arabic strains, and together they had this transporting, bittersweet quality.

In Western classical music the idea of holiness, purity, perfection, and total beauty is expressed through clarity of sound - a bell-like sound. Obviously, that has its own place, and it's a beautiful way of doing it. But I don't think I am the first to point out that in Africa, the more buzzing the sound is, the more it indicates the other world - the spirit world.

In a lot of African instruments, you find a rattle, and sound engineers have a hard time making sense of it.