I like to comprehend more or less everything around me - apart from the creation of my music. It's an obsessive character trait that's getting worse. I don't switch the light on and off 15 times before I leave the room yet, but something's going wrong.

The music beckons to those who are listening.

Yeah, I think the point has well and truly sunk in by now, and I can just carry on. I don't even know what I'm looking for except a bit of hilarity and mild insanity musically, and I can get none of that by just delving into the history.

When I was a kid, the world was such a big place, and I had no idea that I would be afforded these great moments in between doing what I love to do.

Theatres are built because they were the boards for entertainment.

I was competing for attention in a four-piece band that was phenomenal, and I was trying to attack the blues from a kind of white English viewpoint as a singer.

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.