You know, where have you - what have you been doing? You know, and you find yourself sitting next to Jesus, and he's rather an agreeable man. And you have an opportunity to say, so what went down then, you know, that night? And it's supposed to be like him just sort of telling you very conversationally. That was the idea I had. Whether it - whether it comes - came off or not, I don't know.

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.

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.

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 Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day," which I actually recorded on "Quality Street" because I don't think anyone has ever covered it before. You hear it every single Christmas, and it is a great record. That's by Wizzard. It is a really great record, but I don't think anyone's ever covered it before, so I had to go it doing it differently. It's quite different from how the original goes.

I knew how the suits used to talk about the artists, with barely concealed contempt. So I knew what was waiting for me round the corner. Because I wasn't one of those very unusual people like Neil Diamond or Elton John, whose careers just seem to span the decades. I knew I wasn't one of them.

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.