It's very flattering when you look into the crowd and people have made an effort and dressed in your style.

Maybe in music you're making an auditory environment and maybe you change your environment around you to suit your own way.

Music can tear me up inside.

My mum wanted me to go to university.

My style of playing is more enthusiasm and instinct than skill.

On stage, you can use your emotions. It's the place where you can channel them. They have a purpose.

The sense of jubilee for music and what we're making is always genuine.

The stage is a place where I can be wholly myself. Even though you're in front of people almost to be judged, it is a place without judgement.

Touring, and being in a band, it's almost like the other stuff, the other parts of life, get put on hold.

What I really like seeing from the stage is people having their own moments, when people are doing some performance of their own.

When I'm singing I'm always trying to get to the highest point possible. I'd fly to the top of Buckingham Palace to sing to the queen.

When making the first album, I think I wrote a song about every six months. The first album was so much about the vocals carrying it.

When you play, it's like you know that there are people out there who are hearing it for the first time, and I think that's really important.

You know, people always ask, 'What are you like offstage?' And I always say, 'Well, I'm completely normal and mellow.'

You should have high expectations for yourself and others should come second.

My room is like an antique shop, full of junk, and weird stuff. There's a big sword in there. And a taxidermy bird, and a couple of birdcages. And a lot of newspaper cuttings. I used to have a weird thing about cutting out morbid headlines from newspapers, and collecting them. I was fascinated with drowning, which is kind of strange.

At the beginning of my career I was going through a really weird phase of dressing in boys clothes. I would only wear one American Apparel T-shirt and shorts and brogues the whole year round. Not the same T-shirt, obviously, but one style of American Apparel T-shirt. I think I was going through a tomboy stage.

Bono told me how to dance in high heels and he also told me about U2's Glastonbury performance and how everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong, including him ripping his trousers on stage. I think he was lunging and his trousers ripped! He was telling me how he had to find a new way of performing that didn't involve moving.

But I was always much more interested in reading fashion magazines than I was music magazines when I was a teenager. Just that sense of romanticism and escapism and the dream of it has always been quite alluring to me, as well as that sense of becoming a character through clothes.

'Dog Days' was recorded with pens and the wall, and half a stolen drum kit that was out of tune, in what was basically a cupboard. The only instrument I could really play was my voice, so we just layered everything a hundred times. It was enthusiasm over skill.