In Scotland, beautiful as it is, it was always raining. Even when it wasn’t raining, it was about to rain, or had just rained. It’s a very angry sky.
I was brought up west southwest coast of Scotland and my mother and father had a music shop, and so I was surrounded by pianos and drums and guitars, and music, of course.
It’s great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I’ve always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.
I just found over the years that it’s very hard to change people’s perception of what it is that you do.
I had a very erratic career. I got very famous for a minute and then it just all went away, you know?
I do like writing songs in a band. When it’s rock, it’s such a different kind of dynamic, obviously.
I just want to be a better guitar player, really.
I play in a lot of empty rooms.
The thing with playing live is, most of the audience is in their 20s and 30s. If you’re older than that, you don’t tend to go out to shows anymore. So it’s good if you can attract a younger audience because they’ve got the energy to get up off the sofa and go out.
I tend to write, either myself, or I sometimes write with a co-writer, my friend that lives up the road. It’s usually a relatively solitary thing, but I do like coming up with ideas.
The Men at Work thing is always there, it’s always going to be there. It’s not something I consciously think that much about anymore. The thing that stays with you is the songs, which is a good thing for me, because the songs are the things that stand the test of time.
My mother features quite heavily in a lot of my songs.
Most people remember me for a couple of tunes.
It’s frustrating to do albums that you think are worth listening to, but it’s just so difficult to cut through.
I got very famous for a minute and then it just all went away, you know? And for the last 20 years – you’ve got to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and then go on your merry way and start again, in a sense, and that’s what I’ve been doing.
I used to drink a lot. I had to stop drinking because it was getting the better of me, and I replaced that with really doing shows.
Sometimes there’s a general arc that you want to try and get better the longer you do something.
You don’t want to get worse at something.
I like the process of writing songs. It makes me feel good.
I sit around and play acoustic guitar – usually acoustic, sometimes electric, occasionally piano, but more often guitar, just trying to come up with tunes. Ideas kind of pop into your head.
I like to let the songs speak so that they can go through some kind of rebirth as you play them.