When we first arrived in America we'd play a small venue in Florida and some hick would be shouting, "Come on, man! What is this?" But I love those sorts of shows where you have to try and convince people. You have to become ten times more animated and really rattle everyone's cage.

Songwriters always reminded me of that kid at school who would go around with his guitar, like, "Yeah, songwritin' man," looking wistful. That wasn't me - those kinds of people put me off. In the early days, I'd write a bunch of lyrics and almost look at them as a sort of joke, to make the rest of the boys laugh. And then we'd jigsaw all these parts together to make the tunes. With the Last Shadow Puppets album, Miles [Kane] and I took a much more traditional approach, thinking about melodies and chords, melodies and lyrics. That opened the door to more of a purist approach. Every time you write a song, you're looking for some sort of perfection, and you never quite reach it. You're always looking for that extra missing piece.

[commenting on the winners at the 2006 Q magazine awards] A lot of people make jokes about having awards for no reason just for the sake of having awards, and pretending they were good when they weren't. I'm not old enough to know a lot of them, but even I know Take That were bollocks.