I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.

I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.

Even today, skiffle is a defining part of my music. If I get the opportunity to just have a jam, skiffle is what I love to play.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.

In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.

A famous person to themselves, they don’t get up in the morning and think, I’m famous. I’m not famous to me. Famous is a perception.

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That’s what I apply to everything.

These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.

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

There is no black-and-white situation. It’s all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.

When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.

Hearing the blues changed my life.

I do see value in music criticism. Most of the criticism I have received over the years has been very good.

I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn’t mean anything to me.

Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.

If you’re a pop singer, you don’t need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.

The future is keeping you out of the present time.

There’s always got to be a struggle. What else is there? That’s what life is made of. I don’t know anything else. If there is, tell me about it.

As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music.

If it’s what you do and you can do it, then you do it.

I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.

When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn’t the distance or the separation that there is now.

I’m not a rock singer and I don’t want to be a rock singer. I’m not interested. It doesn’t seem to get across.

I’ve never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I’ve felt like howling at the moon a lot of times!

You’ve got to separate the singer and the songs.

I educated myself. To me, school was boring.

Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.

What you see is what you get.

I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That’s what I do. That’s my job. Simple.

My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that’s what I’m doing.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Every performance is different. That’s the beauty of it.

I don’t feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That’s what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.

You can’t stay the same. If you’re a musician and a singer, you have to change, that’s the way it works.

I always record far more than I can use. There’s probably twice as much recorded as comes out.

I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.

The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

I’d love to live in Ireland but I’d like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don’t understand – I lived there before I was famous.

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.

I don’t think nostalgia has to be negative.

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.

Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.