The Beatles were something everyone had in common; this was thirty years ago, there was Dr. Who and everybody knew who the Daleks were and there was The Beatles and everybody knew who George Harrison was.

After the Soft Boys I just didn't want to work with any more guitarists.

I don't really have the gift of the sustained narrative that you need to write a book. I've tried a couple of times, and it just doesn't work. But I get some good passages, so what I'm going to do is just take sections out of them.

If you do things out of time you're weird.

Just as with a guitar, you can improvise a guitar solo, and they'd probably be similar each time, but they won't be exactly the same. With the word, it's probably a bit freer than that. I probably repeat myself more musically than I do verbally.

I think The Beatles are the lasting influence on me, even more so than Dylan.

I'm good at line-drawing, and some of my color stuff is okay. So I just do it for record covers.