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For too long, musicians have been the greatest enemy of music. Their lack of desire to proselytize is a kind of betrayal.

You get the feeling that on a lot of days the audience for most music would kind of rather not be faced with the artist, especially because we've been educated to think that the artist are these special creatures are otherwordly and aren't like us.

A lot of what inspired many musicians is celebrating differences, and people relate to that - more people feel like the unpopular, freaky one than the one in the in-crowd.

I remember being influenced by great artists when I was a kid - not to call myself a great artist - but people who I thought were great enough that they really made a difference. And so I would never want to be disappointed by them, and I want to make sure I never disappoint audience.

When I was a kid growing up in the '60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it's just like a big business.

When I was young, people were almost identified solely by the kind of music they liked. People fell into categories of who liked what.

Every performer who ever performed in rock and roll or even close to it is lying if they tell you that they weren't influenced in some way or another by Elvis Presley. He turned the world around.

Using music to promote hate seems to be the bastardisation of music to me.

The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.

It has always seemed slightly uncomfortable, the idea of politicised musicians. Very few of them are clever enough to do it; if they're good at the political side, the music side suffers, and vice versa.