Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.

The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change you ideas, change your face, you know?

What you learn from working with other performers and musicians is invaluable, really, and can only help you grow. I mean, if you spend your whole life focusing on yourself, you're not really learning much.

When you're doing a deal with someone in the southern Sahara, it's a very different way of doing business than in London. You can't sign them in the usual way because they'd end up getting ripped off, which would defeat the object of setting up a label like this.

China is one of those vast, continental conglomerates that... I mean, if they were to start a tourist trade in China, they'd just bus people in from another province, you know what I mean? They're very self-contained.

I spent two years figuring out how I could turn it into something that would satisfy me as a musician but also make some kind of cross-cultural link. I feel that I kind of at least touched on the possibilities of cross-cultural music, but it is a lifetime's work, and I don't profess to be anything other than a novice at it.