Musician

I don't want The Cure to fizzle out doing 45-minute shows of greatest hits. That would be awful for our legacy.

It's really nice meeting people after a concert. Still, it's very weird to be at the center of a group of 30 people all listening to what you're saying. When that group turns into 300 people, it goes on from weird. Some people revel in it, and I don't.

You can't drink on an eight hour flight, pass out, and then go onstage... well you can, but then you're Spandau Ballet.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

I don't think of death in a romantic way anymore.

I'm happy quite a lot of the time. I've done far more than I ever thought I would have, so I'd be very hard-pressed to walk around miserable.

When we started I wasn't the singer. I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs.

Both me and my wife's extended family all live within a 50-mile radius. Like me, a lot of them did time in London then started drifting back to the countryside and the sea. Perhaps it's a homing instinct.

There were only two times in my life when I've actually felt down about things and gotten myself into a full mental mess. One of the times was in 1982. I had a horrible time for a few months and felt pretty desperate. Then again in 1984, for various reasons, not all of them within my control. Since then, I just wander in and out of black moods.

The idea of reinvention has always seemed bizarre to me.

In some cases, I quite like irritating people who need to be irritated.

I'm not a morose person; it's just that my best songs reflect on the sadder aspects of life.

Performing doesn't come that naturally to me, even though I've done it for years.

I always place myself as the archetypal Cure fan. I'm the wrong age, but I still think that if I like anything particularly, our fans will.

I think that if you become a parent, you stop being a child, and your position in relation to your parents changes.

I am very self-conscious a lot of the time.

Sometimes I'll get to the end of a song, open my eyes and there's all these faces peering at me. It's quite horrifying.

I'm not really obsessed with death.

Whatever I was doing, even when I was at school, I never repressed anything that I felt. I wasn't flamboyant; I was actually quite reticent most of the time. But if I felt I had to do something, I did it.

Whenever I'm home, I haven't got any makeup on. But even in the studio, before I do vocals, I put makeup on.