The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn't cross the road to see them. It's people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.
What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
I've always felt quite like an outsider. I don't really belong in the mainstream, and I quite like that.
Later in life, suddenly, if you're an outsider, it's something to be celebrated, I think, rather than getting on people's nerves.
I'm very interested in religion and different religions, and I know quite a lot about it. I love gospel music, and I love going to churches, but the one drawback is that I don't actually believe in God. And it is quite a handicap, you know.
I like being a big fish in a small pond. I'm not interested in a huge audience because it brings headaches.
The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.
When I find a cover song that I like, I'll work away at it until I kind of believe that I wrote it.
As long as my body holds out, I'll be grooving when I'm 70, and not some sort of horrible spectacle.
As soon as one of my records goes on, it makes a vast portion of the public nervous. They get spooked by it. To some people who have ears to hear, it's a delightful, refreshing change. But to most of the public, it's a load of homemade-sounding nonsense.
Be a military flier or be in a band; those were the two hippest things I could imagine.
I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.
My latest theory is that it's - well, I describe it as, like, being in an apartment with kind of thin walls. And in the apartment next door, they've got a radio tuned constantly on - tuned to a really cool radio station. It's on all the time. And you can just hear it coming through the wall all the time.
You try to make every word count, so there's no doubt what you're talking about. When you're young, you waffle away. Well, I'm done with that. I think it's much more interesting to say just what you mean.
These days, rock 'n' roll is much more about rock than about roll. I don't do rock. But I'm interested in that roll part, because that's the funny little bit that makes it hip.
"I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day," which I actually recorded on "Quality Street" because I don't think anyone has ever covered it before. You hear it every single Christmas, and it is a great record. That's by Wizzard. It is a really great record, but I don't think anyone's ever covered it before, so I had to go it doing it differently. It's quite different from how the original goes.
I suppose I was waiting until I was old enough to have some sort of experience to sing about. When you're young, it's hard to sing the blues. Nobody believes you.
I realized sometime in the early '80s that if I didn't do something - like planning for the future in a way, a kind of pension or something - that if I didn't do something there and then, I was going to be condemned to forever present my three years as a pop star, condensed, as a stage act for the rest of my life. Because that's normally what happens to people in the pop business.
Even if I was really prolific - which I'm not - I think I'd always put at least a couple of covers on my record. I think it's a sort of healthy thing to do. It shows that you're not totally self-obsessed.
And then, one day, they program a new tune, and it really catches your ear, you know, because you can be doing the washing up or something, you know, in your apartment and suddenly you go, whoa, what are they playing in there? And you run to the wall, but it's finished - but the song's finished. You only heard enough of it just the pique your interest. And you never know when they're going to play it again, of course, like a normal radio station.
So you can be about your business, and then on it comes again. And this time you're ready, and you've got a wine glass or something. And you put the glass up to the wall, and you can hear through the wall a little bit more of the song - maybe just the middle bit this time. You know, you managed to get in a little bit of the end. And so it goes on until - because you just got to - you really just want to sing it.
When punk rock came along, the one thing you were not supposed to be was musical.
A devastating culmination of the elegant and the funky, a really sensational musician with enormous depth.
And the other thing for the sort of posher kids was a sort of lethal scooter, you know. One of the things that you just push along with your - really heavy, lethal, you know, trap your fingers in and every bit of metal got rusty very quickly. And the girls I seem to remember they had a thing like a broomstick with a horse's head on the top which they sat astride.
You've got to really know your song, inside and out.
