I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.

There are people I would like to work with. Its a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I cant really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.

I looked at what adults were doing and how they wanted to earn money, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to go away.

In fact, when the fires of empire get hidden, they still stay burning underneath the moss, seething away. This is true with a lot of the countries with really difficult, impenetrable nationalist movements - countries that once had a big empire, like Turkey, England, or even in Italy, with the fascists in the middle of the last century. People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.

I just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.

Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism.