I think escape is sort of like coming to a show with ten thousand other people and responding to that moment. Sharing that moment – that’s escape.

I once ate a pile of brains this big.

Maurice was a silly man. Maurice liked being silly.

I never really did any disco dancing.

You can only sleep in one bed at a time.

If you can play well in the studio, you can play well on stage.

I used to get nervous so I took up Yoga to help me calm down.

No, I enjoyed playing bass and still do.

In theory, I’d like to work in a group. But the group I’d like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.

I hadn’t accepted he was seriously ill. The idea that someone so close to you couldn’t wake up was utterly incomprehensible. Then the doctor came in… Maurice had no brain left. There wasn’t any activity...

The industry does have some influence on who gets other awards. With the Mercury Prize, they don’t. Jon comes from the business, but his heart is still very much in the music. Currently, we have...

I still like being in North of England and I keep a place there. But there are a lot of things about the Continent that are to be preferred. The social institutions work better, women...

Leaving Australia was the hardest thing I have ever done.

I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it’s a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that...

But you have to give your whole life to a cello. When I realized that, I went back to the guitar and just turned the volume up a bit louder.

Those record companies don’t know what’s happening at all.

The best 45 years of my life were the 5 years I spent with Ton Jones.

I’m not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I’m sorry that I’ve done a Neil Diamond song.

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.

When Maurice touched a keyboard, it was like something from a movie, magical. He would always give you something from a movie, and you’d go, what did you just play… immediately inspirational writings, amazing. That’s...

The first time we all played as a band, I think it was in January 1998, in Jonny’s bedroom.

The business of being a popular entertainer in England is just too hard.

I have a huge ego and a huge inferiority complex at the same time.

People are afraid to ask musicians to be involved in projects because they anticipate being turned down. Young artists hesitate before contacting me. People in my position don’t get approached often enough.

I had given up on the guitar between ’75 and ’78. I completely lost interest. I was sick of hearing other guitar players and I was tired of my tunes.

All session people suffer from nerves.

I still say keep away from LSD.

I play music a lot but on my own mostly, so it was nice to be around other people. There was a certain sense a relief in the physical act of just playing and being...

You know, we’d just had a birthday, he was… you know, he still had a future out of him, and all I can is he was just one of the most beautiful people in the...

I got married in 1973, and my career was really at its peak between 1975, and ’81-’82. Everything I put out could do no wrong. Like you can’t imagine.

We enjoy change and freshness, and disco was only one area we’ve delved into.

My music, certainly, has never embarrassed me.

Style has always been very important to us. We grew up in the ’70s. Music was glam rock, punk rock and a very stylish movement.

Jimi… He was the gov’nor and that’s it. He was brilliant, wasn’t he?

It gives the listener a good workout, to listen to the music, the same as it does us to play it.

On Ain’t No Telling I came up with the bass solo.

It just doesn’t mean anything to me, the high-profile, big money side of things. I just want enough to live on, and to be able to get on with what I do, and hang around...

It makes us feel better that everyone out there is thinking of Maurice.

A lot of the time there is a lot of melancholy in the lyrics.

I think that’s one reason why football is so popular again – it’s a game which the citizen can focus on, where the rules are defined.

When you write a song you have an idea of how it should be sung but it doesn’t work out that way if someone else records it.

I still don’t like doing interviews. I hardly do any… I hope this will be the last one for a long while.

Everything I do is usually totally spontaneous.

What’s the point of re-releasing an album? The original sounded good, why change something about it?

There were more groups that made records and didn’t make it than there were groups that made it. So you can imagine the work that we did.

Anybody who thinks pop music’s easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn’t.

There’s no field of music which doesn’t have good ideas.

I couldn’t stay there. I still find Miami very hard, because from my dock I can see the hospital. I can’t stand there and look at it.

Two weeks later, we played our first concert and had 100 people there. It was pretty cool.