I realized sometime in the early '80s that if I didn't do something - like planning for the future in a way, a kind of pension or something - that if I didn't do something there and then, I was going to be condemned to forever present my three years as a pop star, condensed, as a stage act for the rest of my life. Because that's normally what happens to people in the pop business.

Going to Nashville to meet the in-laws was the first time when I'd been in America and not been seen as some sort of eccentric character with a cute accent.

Elvis Costello had a brand new bag. He was a musician, but he knew all about the attitude part of it.

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 sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.

Cruel to be kind means that I love you.

The older I get, the more I think it's this listening. You listen for it, and you have a bit of patience. And it'll come until it sounds - to me, the best songs I've written, I think, are ones that I can't hear anything - any of myself in it. It sounds like a cover song, like somebody else's song - really something you've stolen wholesale off a radio that you've listened to in someone else's flat.