It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.
What you see is what you get.
If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it.
I've never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I've felt like howling at the moon a lot of times!
I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.
I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.
I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.
When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now.
I educated myself. To me, school was boring.
I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.
I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.
You've got to separate the singer and the songs.
Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.
I'm not a rock singer and I don't want to be a rock singer. I'm not interested. It doesn't seem to get across.
I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.
My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.
If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.
I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.
I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple.
You learn to read the audiences after a while, and there are all different kinds of gigs.
A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.
