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

I don't think losing things - in my case, the use of my legs - really damages or hurts you. What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation. A lot of the wars going on right now in the Middle East aren't about poverty and exploitation. They're about humiliation. For a long time, the British and French have been humiliating the people of the Middle East, and encouraging people like Israel to do the same. Israel started out as a socialist state, but we always encouraged them to become rather racist and look down on the local inhabitants, which they now do. It's sad that's happened.

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.

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.

People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.