I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me.

I think there is a certain perversity in my music in that I continue, you know, to eat at the same ball of vomit year after year.

Texting is apocalyptic on some level. It's a reduction of things.

It's always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they're going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.

I have to be able to see the thing that's going on that I'm writing about, or else it just doesn't make any sense to me.

If you're Australian, you feel it in your bones because you're at odds with everybody else, except other Australians, in the sense that people always seem to be behaving strangely. People always seem to be behaving the wrong way, in a different way. You say things and there are silences.

I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.