That's what I like about watching a movie: you enter an imagined world that's more interesting, more engaging than your own. Or less painful than your own.

Hamlet got a gun now.

As people buy less and less records, it's become more and more important for me to spend more and more on them - to lavish that much more attention on them. The Bad Seeds were always quite protective and old school, but Grinderman has opened us up to do anything and be shameless. We're not so precious about it.

I'm not a misogynist, so you can dispense with that. I think I've done wonders for the feminist movement.

When I start to write a song, I initially fall into patterns and creative habits that are familiar, and because they're familiar, they sound convincing. It's important for me to not pursue those ideas, because I've already done them, but to find ideas that are different and feel strange to write and disconcerting to write.

I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.

As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup.