I'm not saving lives. I'm singing and I should go placidly and joyously through the whole thing and work hard and not take it for granted. It's great to have this gift.

People have got to let their bodies breathe a little bit more. That's the great thing about being a pompous, jumped-up rock god. There's plenty of air around you.

Everybody's got something to tell you. And most people have told me to do the obvious thing as far as my career goes. Which would have sent me tottering into the abyss.

Ten minutes in the music scene is the equal of one hundred years outside of it.

Every place is determined by the characters who are there.

I use the music almost as a compass in some kind of quasi-romantic way. I try and go to places that I'm intrigued by, and I take this music with me, using my name at the front.

The trouble is now, with rock'n'roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in.