I talk to someone. Dialogue helps relax the mind and new ideas are planted as people talk to me. Sometimes one phone call is enough, other times meeting a friend at a café or a bar will do the trick. To take the focus out of ourselves for a while helps us find new creative ways. We shouldn’t be prisoners to the traps our brain creates. To read or to go out for a walk can also be rather helpful.

I always want to feel fresh when I do something. If I don’t have that excited feeling, it’s impossible to move people, and that’s the most important thing for me.

I don’t. The process of trying to get to something is part of it. Sometimes I don’t have much of an idea initially. For me, studio time is also about reading and looking at things. I might spend a couple weeks just reading something or looking through images or doing image searches or going to museums and thinking in front of great paintings. And then at some point I start to get back to my own ideas and how they can form into something that has meaning for me.

No, I guess I don’t really worry about that. The answer to a creative block is just to do another creative thing. To me a creative thing is almost anything. So like, literally, if I’m writing and can’t think of anything, I’ll just start moving my fingers typing, sometimes not even words. Just going through the artificial surface motion of it will get your brain going.

A death threat at Glastonbury festival in 1989. The police told me not to go on, but I said I had to because I was headlining. So I wore a bullet-proof vest. It seemed unlikely that I would be assassinated, but it was shocking and very stressful.

An astronaut, a writer, a dancer.

It feels like a yearning but also a kind of overwhelming glowing out.

The most extravagant thing was a bottle of 1904 armagnac for $1,000. I spent $10,000 on a Martin guitar in the 90s. I also spent $100,000 on a Fairlight keyboard and I ended up giving it away. Oh well.

Hormones – other than that, I sleep like a rock.

Something by Leonard Cohen, I haven’t figured out which song yet.