New York is such a competitive place; it tears people apart. People come here and, if they can't make it in the first month, they get torn apart and they have to go back to where they came from. I don't think that's terribly healthy.

I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.

The world is experiencing great change, but you've got loads of people terrified of this change and the Donald Trumps, the Boris Johnsons making utterly simplistic, reductionist policy proposals that are unrealistic but then people buy it up.

It will be interesting to see what the long term fruits of our national apathy will be, 'cos so far they've been pretty foul.

I remind myself that the universe is 15 billion years old, and I'm only 46 years old, so my perspective is sort of limited and fear-based and skewed. So I sort of turn things over to whatever you want to call it - whether it's God, or the universe or the spirit of the universe - and I just sort of turn things over to God and hope that this spirit that has been around for 15 billion years will have a better understanding of how things should be than I do.

The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.'

It's sometimes too easy to point fingers when circumstances dramatically go awry, but as an addict, I'm ultimately responsible for my own decisions, no matter how benign or tragic the consequences.