I don't have a special place or ritual for writing songs, basically I write songs whenever an idea hits me, in my hotel room, on the road, in the plane.

The culture's changed massively. The kids are different, with the phones and stuff. Even if you like a song, you don't really know who the artists are, it's a lot more faceless, it's a lot less tribal. When we were growing up it was much more tribal - it was rock, it was grunge. Now people like songs, [but] they don't necessarily know the song's origins. I don't know how you would feel angry at the world, or distressed, because most people are constantly distracted or consumed.

The song Dakota was first written in Paris. I was doing a promo trip. It was snowing and the hotel room was really cold and boring and for some reason I just had a go of the guitar and the song came pretty quick.

The press will naturally come and go as it has done with all artists, from David Bowie to Neil Young to U2.

Every song I've written, it's about what I've gone through, good or bad. It kind of comes out of me, and I'm grateful for that. I've got friends who are back home who've got no way to express that, and they're kind of in a different position in life. It's alarming to me that I've written something on my bedroom floor when I was 19 or something, and then there's 50,000 people that know the words, and they've got a similar feeling. If you thought about it too much, your head would blow up.

If you repeat what you did in the last tour, the likelihood is it's not gonna be successful twice. People are nostalgic about a particular record, because it's about the time when they were listening to that record. But if you do it again, they're like, I'm not that guy anymore.

Like all bands, the first two albums are always the ones most written about, and the most covered. When a band gets to their third of fourth album, the story of the band has already been told.