I use the name and the thought very, very easily as a sort of comfort - as a kind of comfort, in some way. And in that way, it's just like having a friend, I suppose.
I mean, the way I'm talking, it sounds like I'm - you know, I'm about to go out and sign up for the nearest seminary, and you'll never see or hear from me again. But it's a hard thing to talk about really 'cause I'm not at all sure myself about it. But I've got a very, very simple sort of outlook to it. Yeah, that's all I can say, really.
I don't have the faith now. I certainly believe in Jesus - you know, that he existed and he was a very nice man. And who can disagree with a simple philosophy of treat other people like you'd like to be treated yourself? It's absolutely - nothing I can disagree with that.
And after, you know, having the old chicken or whatever it is they bring around and a couple of cocktails, you turn to the person sitting next to you and say, you know, you going home, then?
You know, where have you - what have you been doing? You know, and you find yourself sitting next to Jesus, and he's rather an agreeable man. And you have an opportunity to say, so what went down then, you know, that night? And it's supposed to be like him just sort of telling you very conversationally. That was the idea I had. Whether it - whether it comes - came off or not, I don't know.
And religious music and the sort of symbolism of it and everything. But I had this idea. Actually, I sort of dreamt it. I woke up - just before waking up one morning, I sort of dreamt this song or the idea of it and the first little bit of it. And I jumped out of bed and I thought, well, you're still asleep. You're going to forget this in a minute - you know, like you do when you've had a dream.
But anyway, I was convinced that it would go away, you know. But the idea was that he was sitting on a flight - you know, one of those sort of fairly long flights, like, sort of, you know, Newark to Denver or something like that - so, you know, a few hours.
And as Craig Brown - he's an English humorist, not a comedian but he's just a writer and humorist - I'm quite a fan of. I heard him talking in a rather similar way on the radio. He said I'm the sort of person - I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was rather interesting - he said I'm the sort of person that can be reduced to tears in an empty church and feel like I'm the CEO of the Devil's organization in a full one, and I tend to feel like that as well. I love empty churches and going into them looking around, but I'm not a churchgoer at all.
I used to sort of take the phone off the hook, you know, put my feet up and watch the TV until it was all over.
I'm very interested in religion and different religions, and I know quite a lot about it. I love gospel music, and I love going to churches, but the one drawback is that I don't actually believe in God. And it is quite a handicap, you know.
It was the 1950s, you know, and they had a ray gun, which was basically a flashlight with a sort of trigger on it. And it buzzed and a red light, you know, came on. But anyway we all had one - Davy Crockett hat.
And the other thing for the sort of posher kids was a sort of lethal scooter, you know. One of the things that you just push along with your - really heavy, lethal, you know, trap your fingers in and every bit of metal got rusty very quickly. And the girls I seem to remember they had a thing like a broomstick with a horse's head on the top which they sat astride.
I loved Christmas. We had a really great time. But there wasn't - it was all - you had to be happy with, you know, an orange and a couple of walnuts, you know, in your stocking.
And there were sort of three toys for boys and three toys for girls. And the boys I can remember was, well, there was a Dan Dare Ray Gun. Dan Dare was a sort of a cartoon character. He was just sort of a - he was like a Battle of Britain fighter pilot, only in space.
I think the best songs that come to me are ones that you sort of listen for. The ones - when I listen to some of my old stuff, I can tell when I had a good idea, but I forced it through, and I can hear myself - the bit that I've written, which sounds clunkier than the stuff that just sort of comes.
The older I get, the more I think it's this listening. You listen for it, and you have a bit of patience. And it'll come until it sounds - to me, the best songs I've written, I think, are ones that I can't hear anything - any of myself in it. It sounds like a cover song, like somebody else's song - really something you've stolen wholesale off a radio that you've listened to in someone else's flat.
You want to sing this song. And so it goes on until eventually, after - well, however long it can take - sometimes a few days, sometimes months - you piece the whole thing together.
And then, one day, they program a new tune, and it really catches your ear, you know, because you can be doing the washing up or something, you know, in your apartment and suddenly you go, whoa, what are they playing in there? And you run to the wall, but it's finished - but the song's finished. You only heard enough of it just the pique your interest. And you never know when they're going to play it again, of course, like a normal radio station.
So you can be about your business, and then on it comes again. And this time you're ready, and you've got a wine glass or something. And you put the glass up to the wall, and you can hear through the wall a little bit more of the song - maybe just the middle bit this time. You know, you managed to get in a little bit of the end. And so it goes on until - because you just got to - you really just want to sing it.
My latest theory is that it's - well, I describe it as, like, being in an apartment with kind of thin walls. And in the apartment next door, they've got a radio tuned constantly on - tuned to a really cool radio station. It's on all the time. And you can just hear it coming through the wall all the time.
It's like a little folk song. I think it might've been Harry Belafonte or someone like that who did it. And "Merry Christmas, Everybody" by Slade, which is a rock group - a rock-pop group who are very big over there.
"I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day," which I actually recorded on "Quality Street" because I don't think anyone has ever covered it before. You hear it every single Christmas, and it is a great record. That's by Wizzard. It is a really great record, but I don't think anyone's ever covered it before, so I had to go it doing it differently. It's quite different from how the original goes.
I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.
To a certain extent, yes, we do. But there's - but there's a very limited menu. There's only about sort of 20 songs that you hear on rotation.
I found myself in Zurich Airport. I'd done a TV show, oddly enough, with Mavis Staples. That's the way they do it in Switzerland. And I'd had a bit of a late night with members of her band. And I was - my flight was delayed. And I was sitting in the airport, and I just came up with the idea. And by the time, we landed at Heathrow, I'd pretty much sort of got it.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: