I'm still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music.

You want to sing this song. And so it goes on until eventually, after - well, however long it can take - sometimes a few days, sometimes months - you piece the whole thing together.

I've always felt quite like an outsider. I don't really belong in the mainstream, and I quite like that.

I felt that in order to do what I wanted to do, I had to do certain things, and one of them was to have a hit in my own right. At least one.

There's really never any sort of master plan. I find if I've got a couple of tunes that I think are possibilities, I phone everyone up and get them into the studio and we'll have a go at recording them.

It was the 1950s, you know, and they had a ray gun, which was basically a flashlight with a sort of trigger on it. And it buzzed and a red light, you know, came on. But anyway we all had one - Davy Crockett hat.

I mean, the way I'm talking, it sounds like I'm - you know, I'm about to go out and sign up for the nearest seminary, and you'll never see or hear from me again. But it's a hard thing to talk about really 'cause I'm not at all sure myself about it. But I've got a very, very simple sort of outlook to it. Yeah, that's all I can say, really.