Leonard Cohen can give you "Leonard Cohen" - the self-deprecating wit, the slow, considered speech, the perfectly-honed anecdote - Tom Waits is far more comfortable giving a journalist "Tom Waits" the character, whose conversation is really a series of strange tales, learned or ad-libbed.

Not so much that I wanted to give up rock writing, but I also wanted to try something new. So I moved to a crumbling stately heap on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere in southwest France, about 60 miles from Bordeaux: wine instead of cocaine.

Even though it felt completely natural - strangely enough - recording an album, I was very shy about making it public.

The difference between fiction and journalism is that you can disguise the characters, so you won't get your legs broken, and there's no interview tapes to transcribe.

I love Tom [Waits] for the same reason I love Leonard Cohen, which is that they are both one-offs, templates; they both seemed old, or at least dressed old when they were young; both kind of lived their careers backwards.

There's that old cliché which has a lot of basis in truth, that all music journalists are failed rock stars. They all harbour the inner feeling they should be up under the spotlight and the microphone is there for them.

I didn't want to live in LA again, although I'd go back every couple of months to do an interview, usually with a heavy rock or metal band. And as the decade went on, so much of that scene had become totally corrupted by too much coke and money and silicone.