Every song has a bouquet, which is the music. If you can put words with something that is really apt, then you've done it.

I wanted to modernize music, but more than that, to completely modernize people's attitudes towards life in general.

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.

In some ways, I lament the introduction of civilisation on such a huge scale, because it has given us a lot of room to abuse each other, which we continue to do.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It's like therapy for me, because it exposes what I'm really thinking.