When I first started drinking, it was working for me. It was great. Like when you're doing a gig and you're in a band and you're in the truck and there's nothing to do in the truck and the gigs are all the same and the hotels are all the same...it's the hotels, the car, the gig.

Go up to the mountain, go up to the glen, where silence will touch you, and heartbreak will mend.

I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that.

I don't have any regrets about the album [Veedon Fleece]. But it's the same old story - an album is basically 35 or 40 minutes of what you do. It's 'part' of what you do.

I don't like to wonder about it-I just like to do it. That's what I mean about the image stuff and all that. There's far too much emphasis being placed on that kind of stuff... the whole emphasis on what does it mean? Everybody has their own particular vision.

Jazz goes into folk music, into rock music. Jazz is in practically everything except classical music where they're reading the same music all the time, the same way, the same tempo every night.

Going down the old mine with a transistor radio.