You have to keep challenging yourself. I've always tried to do that, and I'm not saying I've always been successful. Maybe I've rewritten the same song; it's inevitable, but I've always been mindful of taking the writing somewhere else. You can't stick in your little comfort zone.

There's more to distract people, isn't there? When I was a kid there was music and football and clothes. And that was kind of it, really. Those three things defined you as a person.

I've always liked my clothes, even before I could properly afford them. Clothes for me were never a cloak, a cover. They were how I chose to express myself.

I love the Kinks, but I like all sorts of music. If I stay at home at night and play records, I just go through the whole spectrum, really. I just love music.

I want to hear as much music as I possibly can before I leave this mortal coil but it's impossible to hear it all because there's so much of it.

When you look at so much of what we all love, there's either soul-based to it, or it's the blues. It's really the beginnings of any kind of music. It really is; it all starts there. Because after that, it's music of the moment.

I don't know if there's any formula. I'm not sure I believe in that, to be honest. I don't know if there's any rhyme or reason to music. Sometimes it hits and sometimes it doesn't, really.