I'm very lucky, I'm happy with life because my experiences led me to do what I had to do. I don't have any regrets whatsoever.

You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived.

It's the same thing as a primitive of Africans, Indians, nomads or whatever - when they start getting up and doing their ritual and doing the dance, it's just what's coming through. It's the spirit. Rock 'n' roll is still primitive.

It's real difficult to pin down directions. I just want to do collaboration-tape stuff.

I'd found that what I wrote and put out on records somehow was not fitting into how I perform on stage.

I just wanted to stop and try to get some perspective. [ A Period of Transition] it was just a matter of wanting to review the whole thing...to try and get some relationship to what I was doing.

My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.