In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.

I stopped drinking a few years ago, and drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble. You can get away with that your 20s, but not in your 60s, and I'll be 70 next year. Life is a small space now, much more intimate. I'm not out there in the world anymore, but I'm watching.

I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.

We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.

I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law.

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.

The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.