There is drinking in lots of the songs because there is drinking in life. Drinking stimulates the imagination.

What I do is I'm a bandleader, frontman, entertainer.

I hate the bloody highways. I hate hamburgers, I hate Greyhound buses. I'd have liked to have been in America during the Jazz Age, or the Golden Age of Hollywood.

I play Irish popular music, yeah? Calling it folk is like putting it in a box. It's a living tradition, you know?

All I can do is go by the words of Christ, who was the only talker we had, for f - 's sake. Buddha didn't speak. The Holy Ghost didn't speak. But I think it all boils down to the same thing - it's all about unity, love, compassion.

When I'm writing a song, it gives me more actual pleasure to hear someone else sing it than do it meself.

Irish music is guts, balls and feet music, yeah? It's frenetic dance music, yeah? Or it's impossibly sad like slow music, yeah? Yeah? And it also handles all sorts of subjects, from rebel songs to comical songs about sex, you know what I mean, yeah? Which I don't think people realize how much innuendo there is in Irish music.