Old people go to the polls because they can't get erections, young people stay home, do drugs and have sex.

Musically, New York is a big influence on me. Walk down the street for five minutes and you'll hear homeless punk rockers, people playing Caribbean music and reggae, sacred Islamic music and Latino music, so many different types of music.

To paraphrase Paul from the New Testament, he has a great soliloquy about love, where he's basically saying, if I've figured out the secrets of the universe but I don't have love, figuring out the secrets of universe means nothing.

I like to quote Homer Simpson: 'I'm like a chocoholic except for alcohol.' I come from a long line of alcoholics. It's funny because when I first started making records, I was at the tail end of a period of sobriety, so I somehow got this reputation as Captain Sober.

When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel', it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous.

This whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid.

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.