There’s so much excellent new music around that I can’t afford to buy it all and I haven’t the time to review as much as I’d like. I can’t remember a better time to be a musician or to listen to music!

It’s like someone cutting up a loved one in front of you, all the time insisting they’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re very devious nowadays.

I now believe that major labels can only work with people who care more about fame and money than the quality of the art they produce.

I like being 35, I like having a bit of money to spend on music and useless gadgets. The net is providing new ways to communicate and cooperate that just didn’t exist in the 80s.

Sometimes, an afternoon spent in bed with someone can be the most important thing in the universe.

We, the artists, make the stuff they sell and they’re like ticks on our backs, sucking the life out of us.

Everyone has to find their own way, it’s just that I don’t want to go that way myself. If a band likes being on a major and feels happy there, good luck to them.

I think I am a star – I’m simply a funny-shaped star.

I like ‘Bewitched’ off the first album because it’s one of the happiest songs I’ve ever written and, as any writer will tell you, happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs.

The Americans are more honest about it and just call it college rock.

I will never sign to a major record label again. If, by some mega fluke, a record of mine looked like it might break big, I’d try and do it via an indie or somehow license it. I’m not having my music owned by those corporate bastards again.

I don’t believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that’s dishonest. For example, I’m not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don’t, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.

They consistently hobble artists’ in the name of selling more units then are surprised when the fans don’t buy the lukewarm music this produces. So they then drop the artist.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I’m not saying I’ve got the answers, just a of questions that I don’t hear other artists asking.

There should be a place and the space for all pop.

There’s so much excellent new music around that I can’t afford to buy it all and I haven’t the time to review as much as I’d like. I can’t remember a better time to be a musician or to listen to music!

I hated my brief fame. We had TV vans camped outside my house, reporters hounded me… people i’d know for years started treating me differently.