I am very sensitive to music, so I can quite easily allow myself to access that space in which I am completely taken over. And you can get quite a reaction out of the crowd when you do that.

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.

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 some traditional African dances, people wear masks in order to become the embodiments of particular spirits. I have heard that they often cover the mouth-piece with spider webs or something that resonates, so that their voice gets distorted, ceasing to be the voice of a human and becoming representative of a voice that comes from another world.

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

One of my interests is to understand what constitutes the vibe of a place and what makes one concert different from another.

I think what a lot of people forget is that a lot of the music in the '60s and the '70s was made in the spirit of daring, spontaneity, and adventure, so the minute all that sinks into this sense of a classic form, it has lost its spirit.