Musician

I'd become a corporate rock musician. I worked for 'Chris Rea.' He felt like another person. I even talked about him in the third person.

When I was young, I wanted, most of all, to be a writer of films and film music. But Middlesbrough in 1968 wasn't the place to be if you wanted to do movie scores.

My family is the No. 1 priority. Next is the motor-racing season.

Being on the road isn't hell - it's pure pleasure now.

'Course, 'Santini' bombed in England, y'know. It came out at the height of the New Wave, which couldn't have been a worse time for a solo singer trying to sell rock melodies.

I think all the business stuff - the promotion, the hype, the high-power lunches, and the permanently injected smiles - is boring.

Eric Clapton's scales - when he comes off a high note and it's time for a refrain or a little bit of a rest, he peals off scales going downwards that are so good it's unbelievable.

None of my heroes were big rock stars, and I thought, 'This isn't how it's meant to be.' It wasn't about making music so much as selling it.

As soon as I paid the mortgage off in 1988, I started racing cars.

I love being on tour. That's the best job in the world, if only I had a different body.

After I got back my career and my artistic freedom in 1982, my golden rule is the music must never suffer.

You do some crazy things when you're young.

Rock n' roll was my art school. For many people from working-class backgrounds, rock wasn't a chosen thing, it was the only thing: the only avenue of creativity available for them.

I spend as much time as I can in my garden, and if I'm not writing songs or gardening, I'm painting.

I've given up my Ferrari - the idea of going through my village in a 488... You can't drive them on English roads.

I've had nine major operations in ten years. A lot of it is to do with something called retroperitoneal fibrosis, where the internal tissues attack each other.

Music is a saviour for me.

I was born in the overdub years. I wish there wasn't such a thing as a multitrack tape player, because what you heard would be the record.

I feel I've had three careers in one, really. There was the 'Benny Santini' stuff; that came with a general sense of, 'Who the hell is he?' And then there was 'The Road To Hell' stuff, and now there's the blues stuff.

When 'The Road To Hell' happened, I didn't know what I was doing. Your diary fills up, and you have no objectivity. At home, you're trying your best to fit in. Sometimes I'd race from Heathrow to find myself sitting in a village hall watching my kids. It felt really weird. I didn't enjoy it.