The thing I've learned is it's good to restrict your palette somewhat. I will try and, say, use two or three instruments on one track. You learn, after a while, they're all good at certain things and other things fall outside of the natural areas they work well in, so I tend to stick with what they do best.

When I only had one or two synthesisers you learn how to do everything on those things and you know them inside out. I think that's the best way to be with them.

There's a lot of people I know who have a lot of synthesisers and they don't really know anything about them, they know the specifications and everything, but they don't really get to know them.

Going to public school is like living in bubble, you have no concept of what other people do.

If you saw my musical collection it's absolutely horrendous, I've got everything from Stockhausen to The Beach Boys to Gina G, all sorts of terrible things and other people come here and look at my record collection and go, "Ah, you can't possibly like that - how embarrassing!"

I do take a computer to do some processing live and I might use a couple of plug-in synthesisers, 'cause obviously you can take quite a lot of power in terms of sound generation on a computer that I can trigger from a couple of keyboards. And it means I don't have to take some of my vintage stuff and have it trashed by various airlines which has happened in the past. But I still take some vintage stuff with me, I'll take that risk because I like using all that stuff.

I don't really worry about whether things fit into a genre or not, it's whether I like it and whether the two things sit well together, that's my main criteria when I write.