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.

I'm just lucky because my kids are grown-up - I love them, very proud of them, and we are in close contact as big-time friends, but they don't need me that much now and I can actually enjoy this wonderful world of music.

I hate cliché. And when you're a rock singer in 1966, or whatever it was, psychedelic blues, through to the '70s, which we know all about, and the '80s, which was a scramble to hang on in, and the '90s, which was a great time for experimentation... and I'm really still excited. The huge vast diagonals within the music that I've been involved with.

I don't know how much more expressive you can get than being a rock and roll singer.

It's funny, you know - time does travel pretty quickly, and I do have good friends, and the further away I go from them in location, it matters that I keep on the same line and the same groove that I had and preserve that groove with people who I see seldom.

People run away, pull their hair, go off in different directions, nodding their heads and going, "Oh, God." I am slightly disheveled, I think. I'm really pleased that I am, because otherwise I could be in a really, really dull and boring place now, as a musician, at least.

I'll just carry on being a dated flower child.