A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.

So I use a tape recorder a lot to record ideas.

I could learn how to press 'Record' on a tape recorder and write for a newspaper or a magazine.

It's such a relief for me to sit in front of a tape recorder and not be using it to learn my lines.

If you can't play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it's not a song.

My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.