"I listen to all these songs now and I think about the person I was when I wrote and recorded them...There is passion here, and a kind of romanticism, which is tempered by an awareness of the riskiness of being romantic. I can hear a complicated mix of self-revelation and self-preservation...

And what an extraordinary kind of unearned confidence it takes to write a lyric like “I’m old enough now to know there’s no such thing” at the age of 19."

It's all I know how to do really, in these kind of times. Carry on in spite. Make a world that's a sanctuary.

Ideally to be written by Martin Amis but we can’t have everything