Understanding the origins of your own creative talent…

Someone asked me recently “When did you first realise you had this amazing musical talent?”. The answer to that is, I don’t think I have an amazing musical talent…I just get ridiculously obsessed with the details of things and work really hard to understand why they work, how to take them apart, and how to put them back to together. If anything, my only talent is maybe seeing and hearing the small stuff that others can’t… I’ve never been able to read music, I can’t even understand tab notation, but early on as a kid I could hear a melody in a song on the radio and play it back on a keyboard. Then I found I could do it on a guitar too.

But I have a terrible problem with focussing on one thing. I am always distracted and I have to feel like everything I do is creative not prescriptive. It’s why I’ll never be a virtuoso musician, because that requires a commitment to a single instrument that’s measured in 10s of thousands of hours. I’m also crap at rehearsing, because I find it boring and the distractions and excuses start to creep in, not to do it…For me playing 3 or 4 instruments is much more fun than playing one.

The studio is like my etch-a-sketch, lego, meccano, scalextric and a train set all in one. I can play with the idea in my head and turn it into something real and tangible that I can share with the world.