Tell us about:

Your latest single you have released:

“Only Sixteen” is a nostalgic song, apparently too well sung to be emo rap but with too much spoken word to be pop. It’s the sad tale of a man still ruminating over his heartbreak at age sixteen, when he was left by his lover who “wanted to be a woman.” In the video we explore what gender that lover may have been.

Your first single and how you felt when it was released:

My first single in my current incarnation was “Ne dramatize pas.” I was elated when Cool Hunting wrote the first review and the YouTube views started mounting – imagining the potential for a viral hit. Then YouTube deleted the clip and Perez Hilton described it as “the worst song ever.”

Your favourite song that you have created that is an album track:

“Waste Yourself,” a pro-suicide song that went “The thing to do is seppuku / Your one chance for originality / Your moment of glory / Your whole life story’s / Been blah blah blah banality.” It was a commentary on the accusations that rock music was causing teen suicides, but we actually ended up leaving it off the album for fear that it might in fact inspire kids to off themselves – it was really that f****** good.

Your favourite song to play live:

As a vocalist, I go for slightly more challenging songs like Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” and Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” – they tend to bring a tear to the eye of music lovers when I give them the Benedict treatment.

The song that was the longest to write and why?

It took five hundred years of work to write my song “To His Mistress,” as it combines lines from the great love poems of the metaphysical poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, like Michael Drayton, John Donne and Robert Greene: “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part. / It’s not the day that’s breaking, it is my heart. / O glorious sun, imagine me the West, / Shine in my arms, set yourself again my chest.”                                                                           

Your most emotional track:

My most emotional track is called “Don’t Do That,” which goes: “Don’t do that, don’t get undressed / With your clothes off I’m defenceless / Your body is my inferno / When I enter it I give up all hope. / I know what I want and I know how to get it, / But the human spirit subsists within limits.” It’s about how love and desire are pure manifestations of our life force, but they are also an inescapable source of suffering. It was a very raw and spontaneous lyric, but I still managed to quote Dante and the Sex Pistols.

The best lyric you have ever written:

I’ll give you a few for your readers to choose from:

1. You say that when I go down on you, it looks like I ‘ve got a moustache.

2. Faults in rhyme and versification / I balance on top of the balcony rail / And piss in a line / That graphs a quadratic equation.

3. Wouldn’t it be loverly / Wouldn’t it be grand / To talk in east end cryptolect / Just like Russell Brand

Describe the feeling you get when you walk on stage to do a show:

Wasted. Though I aspire to being as naturally relaxed on stage as David Guetta, who has been known to chow down on his dinner during sets in Ibiza. What a pro!

The hardest track to play live:

Any song when the backing track cuts out unexpectedly, and you have to actually play your instruments and sing.

Essential items you always take on tour with you?

I’m very minimalist and eco-conscious, so I carry as little as possible on the road. I even take one for team ecology in my rider, by accepting the brown M&Ms that Van Halen get out sorted from theirs. But I’ve never gone the full Leonard and given up music to join a monastery. I tried but they were so intolerant. They threw me out for inebriation and hassling Leonard Cohen to break his vow of silence and sing Famous Blue Raincoat. Conduct unbecoming of a lama, apparently.

Describe your fans in three words:

Connoisseurs of Enduring Art.

A song by another artist or band you wish you had written:

“Happy Birthday to You.” Can you imagine the royalties?

What we can look forward to from you this year:

I’ve got an Adele concert coming up. Can’t wait. I’m a major fan. Really good seats too.