Quote

A tour is the most intense, stimulating way to hear music; it's the best form to receive it. There's genuine excitement from people. I feel like we've stepped up a level.

Touring has been a major part of my career. I've done a lot of huge shows, including a 13-night sell-out stint at the Indoor Arena in Birmingham, playing to a total audience of 65,000.

If you don't tour, you cannot expect to sell a huge numbers of your albums either. It was both a business - and an economical decision and we wanted to play anyway. We just wanted to get out for the tour when it was safe enough for us.

Touring is tough. You're almost in a haze because you don't really know where you are half the time: You're in a hotel room one moment, and the next thing you know, you're onstage performing for 60,000 people, then you're back on an airplane. It's very hectic and I couldn't do it without my family.

The best part of touring is the opportunity to make the music. You get to do what you love and have the ability to go out on stage every night and create.

I cultivated this fan base that I really didn't really understand or appreciate until I put my first headlining tour up for sale. 500- to 1,000-capacity rooms weren't an underplay for me at the time. I'd never done a tour before!

The nature of touring is packaging acts together that have strong catalogues of music. It's about making sure that it's a winning combination. It's really about giving people value for their money.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left.

Going to a concert can sometimes be very difficult. It can be a long journey. There's the ticket prices. But when the music goes to the community - not the community coming to the concert - they say, 'Wow! I didn't know that this music was so amazing!'

I wish records got made faster and looser with less thought in them, but since touring is so much more profitable than records, you spend so much time on the road that it's hard to work on them. And the records get further and further apart.