I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.

On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers.

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.

I really liked them, not just Syd, but all of them. Roger was very important, I thought, his contribution. And so was Rick's organ playing. It was a good band. It became something else completely, obviously.

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

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.

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.