We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, "Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?"

I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.

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.

In getting older, I find myself becoming progressively more ineffectual in a lot of different ways, and part of that is down to no longer having the youthful feeling that what you're doing has any true impact.

The editing of a song is largely what makes the song for me and I think that actually if I had started going like 'I want you to burn' it would have pinned that song down to a particular thing and made that song a smaller idea than what it is. By leaving that off it's much more open, broader.

At school I was an anti-magnet for women.

I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing.