I like to put my iPad on the window and leave it there for however long the journey is, so that I'm staring out, and it's staring out. We're kind of staring out together. It's very poetic to me, watching that absent-minded passing of time. You realize how much you've taken in. What is left of that memory of you staring out of the window for an hour? It's all on the iPad.
The whole period has taught me that I enjoy being part of an ensemble rather than just a front man. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy that too, but I get more enjoyment out of really listening to everyone.
I was approached by Oxfam to go to Mali as their ambassador and get involved in their various initiatives out there. But I felt that was missing the point of using me, a musician
I can't be bothered anymore about giving songs titles.
More and more, cultural groups are cross-pollinating, and we're getting much more interesting art as a result.
Danger Mouse is now working on a bunch of other records, translating his ideas about remixing into all sorts of other projects.
Being in Blur has allowed me to travel and hear the music that's being made all over the world.
The best way to get to know Africa is to go there and see what it is. To know somewhere that crazy and that magnificent, you have to spend some time among people, the rhythm of their lives.
I used to go to work and take heroin in the studio and then stop when I came home.
Well, as resources inevitably disappear [in Africa], people have to make do with a lot less. You have to be much more ingenious with a lot less, and accept that you can't get your perfect tuna sandwich on a street corner.
I was going through a break up. I was depressed... I really did need to do something. Recording an album was a great escape. I don't know what would have happened if I wouldn't have started to work.
I'm an English songwriter/composer, working in Mandarin and trying to find something about Chinese culture that I really relate to and respect and feel some genuine emotions for - and it's quite hard, the pentatonic scale, and that, in a way, is why I think it works. Because I'm forced to limit myself to quite strict rules about what I did. Maybe that's how I avoided pastiche.
I used to be younger than my producers but now I'm older than my producers and I think that works for me, that works better cause you get a good kick up the ... everyday.
I'm slightly ambivalent to the whole relationship between the whole advertising world and music. I think sometimes it works and sometimes it's a really bad mismatch. I think on this occasion its fine because the iPod is like your own mini-library and that can't be a bad thing. It promotes eclecticism and that's very much what we are about so it's a good relationship.
I'm not really one of those people who believes that if you're a musician you can just leave that behind and start getting into politics
The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change you ideas, change your face, you know?
When you're doing a deal with someone in the southern Sahara, it's a very different way of doing business than in London. You can't sign them in the usual way because they'd end up getting ripped off, which would defeat the object of setting up a label like this
