Quotes

People often say that they wish they'd been around in the 60s but we're happy just where we are. We love rock's back catalogue, and now we've got a chance to add to it. After all, tunes never go out of fashion.

We've never thought of ourselves as big rock stars, doing the 'A' list thing with celebs hanging off us. That's exciting, but our music kind of demands we keep ourselves as normal as possible. The fact we don't have that superstar image helps people relate to us. People relate to rock 'n' roll stars because rock 'n' roll's exciting and there's a big story to it, but it's not us. We have normal problems. I'm the same person I was before, just a lot busier and a lot luckier.

I'm not a great bookworm, but I like music biogs. I've just embarked on Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Allliance, which is interesting so far. It's one of those great stories that you want to get insight into. I saw Morrissey on Jonathan Ross's chat show recently and it dispelled the whole myth for me a little bit. He seems like a slightly different person now: a bit of a sad character. It's a bit like seeing Paul McCartney - the way he is now, you don't connect him to the mythology of The Beatles, in a way. Believe it or not, I quite like reading poetry. I have Sylvia Plath's Ariel in my bathroom, which is one of my favourite books of all time. It's only got about 15 poems in it, but - and this is going to sound terrible - every time I go to the bog I read one. They never get boring and they're so inspiring: so angry and hard. Her take on the world was totally unique. And she probably keeps me regular.

[2004] I don't think many bands can connect in the way that we do. It annoys me that people call us 'bedwetters' - it takes a lot of guts to be really honest. It's much easier to pull in a lot of 1970s rock clichés and be someone else, but to be yourself is very tough.