I like being a big fish in a small pond. I'm not interested in a huge audience because it brings headaches.

I like being a big fish in a small pond. I'm not interested in a huge audience because it brings headaches.

When my pop career was over, I was scratching my head, thinking, "God, how am I going to do something after I'm forty?" I was in my mid-thirties, thinking I was on the scrap heap.

I use the name and the thought very, very easily as a sort of comfort - as a kind of comfort, in some way. And in that way, it's just like having a friend, I suppose.

Well, this is shortly after the idea was put to me because it wasn't my idea to do a Christmas record. We can talk about that a little bit, if you like, later on. But I wrote that song actually about two days after the idea was put to me.

The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn't cross the road to see them. It's people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.

I'm an extremely slow worker, very unprolific. It can take me weeks to do a three-minute song, or at least to make it sound, in my mind, like I haven't written it. That's when I'm satisfied.