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.

Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.

The gap between rich and poor is, in fact, widening enormously. This idea of building up the powers of people who are already powerful and keeping everyone else back is a recipe for endless misery and conflict.

I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.

I don't want an entire world full of people just drinking Coca-Cola and eating McDonald's hamburgers and listening to American pop records. That would be a lesser world. I hope the cultural diversity is rich and is able to survive the Westernization of their economies.

I think it's hypocritical to complain about the rise of China. For 50 years, we were telling everybody in the world that the big threat was Communism, so now the countries that were Communists are now rampant capitalists - and they're doing very well, in some ways much better than the UK. Well, we asked for it. We told them that's what you have to do, and they're doing it, buying up your biggest hotels in New York. You have to laugh.

I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.