I was very awkward as a kid. I was a square trying to fit into a circle and it never worked for me. The harder I tried, the harder I fell. For some reason I was a real target and I got beat up and called names.
Running is very rhythmic, and I have written a lot of lyrics while out running. It's a very musical exercise, and sometimes I like to sing when I run. Your whole body is doing the same thing.
One of the greatest tools you have as a songwriter is anonymity. If someone knows too much about the songwriter, they don't get to insert their own characters. I don't want the audience thinking about the gay guy who wrote the song.
People are talking about immigration, emigration and the rest of the fucking thing. It's all fucking crap. We're all human beings, we're all mammals, we're all rocks, plants, rivers. Fucking borders are just such a pain in the fucking arse.
The Pleasure Seekers eventually turned into Cradle, when we started writing our own material. My younger sister Nancy was brought in as singer and I kind of stepped aside as main lead singer and concentrated on my instrument.
I've got a quick mouth, and I set my boundaries. Nothing ever happened that I couldn't handle. Once when a guy came on stage making rude gestures, I hit him over the head with my guitar.
I got my first real bass guitar in my hands when I was 14 - a 1957 Fender Precision, which is still hanging on the wall in my front room. I loved the heaviness of it and the feel of the wood. I still do.
One day, someone said to me, 'Do you want to go jump out of an airplane?' I felt like I had nothing to lose anymore, so I said, 'Why not?' And every day since then, I ask myself that question.
Sting I've seen a few times, and he really inspired me in the sense that he breaks the songs down a lot and will take a different approach. He'll take an acoustic approach to them; he'll rearrange them for the live stage.
The other thing I felt was that the philosophical concept behind the experiences also looked like it had been designed by technicians and not by entertainers. I felt I needed to grab hold of it and try and push the envelope as much as I possibly coul...
So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.
It was supposed to be a year or two just to refresh my batteries, but I moved to Silicon Valley in the early 90's, and one thing let to another, got very involved in high tech, and formed a company and it ended up doing pretty well.
I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be.
There is the danger of over preparation, of loss of spontaneity; over rehearsal is the most terrible thing you can imagine. We do have a very close association between costume and set designer, though. And the cameraman is very important, of course.
Do I believe in the supernatural? Oh yes, certainly. I can't believe, I can't accept that you die and that's the end. Physically maybe it is a fact. But there's something about the mind that's more than that.
The Alanis Morissette tour, everybody thinks that was all sitting around, lighting candles and talking intelligently about synergy and big words. That band was so gnarly. We were such scumbags. Alanis had no idea. We were like Van Halen.
I only started playing piano because I had chickenpox when I was about 14 and wasn't allowed to play my drums for a whole week... We had a piano in the house, so I just sat down and played that instead.
After my grandfather's plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast ...
What I learned about stammering was that, when as a young child you lose the confidence of anyone who wants to listen to you, you lose confidence in your voice and the right to speech. And a lot of the therapy was saying, 'You have a right to be hear...
Sometimes your body language is enough for an actor to know that you're not happy. And you don't really need to say it out loud if you deal with actors you know very well. And I don't think you really need to be explicit.
My house is really clean. It's a really big house so I have three ladies who come in and clean it twice a week, but let's just say that, in between times, maybe it's not quite so clean.
