Sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees as an artist.
Instead of more violence why isn’t there a meeting of religious leaders. It’s all got to be dialogue – that’s the only way. Get everybody from each religion together and say ‘Listen, this can’t go on. Why do we have all this hatred?’
I couldn’t strut around like Mick Jagger, or smash my instrument up like Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend: bitter subsequent experience has taught me that if you get carried away and try and smash up a piano by pushing it offstage, you end up looking less like a lawless rock god and more like a furniture removal man having a bad day.
There’s really no point in asking what if? The only question worth asking is: what’s next?
Having obviously forgiven me for the incident on the Starship, Stevie Wonder turned up one day and took out a snowmobile, insisting on driving it himself. To pre-empt your question: no, I have absolutely no idea how Stevie Wonder successfully piloted a snowmobile through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado without killing himself, or indeed anyone else, in the process, but he did.
Like I said, sometimes a gut feeling is the most important thing; sometimes you have to trust fate.
It was insanity, but it sounded romantic.
And that was the moment my mother turned up, in character as a raving sociopath.
That was just the mindset of the times: that happiness was somehow less important than keeping up appearances.
I’ve played pianos, I’ve jumped on pianos, I’ve fallen off pianos and I’ve pushed a piano into the crowd, hit a member of the audience with it and spent the rest of the night frantically apologizing to them.
There’s times in my life when music has been an escape, the only thing that worked when everything else seemed broken, but at that moment I had nothing to escape from. I was twenty-four, successful, settled and in love.
You can send yourself crazy wondering. But it all happened, and here I am. There’s really no point in asking what if? The only question worth asking is: what’s next?
It seems insane now that no one even raised an eyebrow, when you consider what I was wearing and doing onstage, but it was a different world then.
And there was no getting around the fact that I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot. Admittedly, I thought it was a pretty good song about a warthog who farted a lot: at the risk of appearing big-headed, I’m pretty sure that in a list of the greatest songs ever written about warthogs who fart a lot, mine would come in somewhere near the top.
I’m sure the music at Boy would have sounded as wonderful as ever, but there does come a point where, in that environment, you start to feel like the dowager duchess at the debutantes’ ball, peering down your pince-nez at the latest arrivals.
For years, I lived a life in which nothing really happened.
The next morning found me pacing around the house, trying to work out what was the earliest you could call someone who’d been out the previous night at a Halloween party, without looking like the kind of person they’d eventually have to get a restraining order out against.
And it really taught me something important. Sometimes, you just have to step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone. It’s like going deep inside yourself, forgetting about whatever emotions you may have and thinking: no, I’m a performer. This is what I do. Get on with it.
A psychologist would probably say that, as a kid, I was trying to create a sense of order in a chaotic life, with my dad coming and going and all the reprimands and rows. I didn’t have control over that, or over my mother’s moods, but I had control over the stuff in my room. Objects couldn’t do me any harm. I found them comforting. I talked to them, I behaved as if they had feelings. If something got broken, I’d feel really upset, as if I’d killed something.
AIDS might as well stand for “Appalling Indifference to the Disenfranchised in Society.