to be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running

It is the satisfaction of doing it for yourself and motivating others to work with you in bringing it about. It is about the fun, innovation, creativity with the rewards being far greater than purely financial.

The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

If people aren't calling you crazy, you aren't thinking big enough.

What matters is working with a few close friends, people you respect, knowing that if times did turn bad these people would hold together.

I never went into business just to make money - but I found that if I have fun, the money will come. I often ask myself, is my work fun and does it make me happy? I believe that the answer to that is more important than fame or fortune. If it stops being fun, I ask why? If I can't fix it, I stop doing it.

When I was 15, I left school to start a magazine, and it became a success because I wouldn't take no for an answer. I remember banging on James Baldwin's door to ask for an interview when he came to England. Then I got Jean-Paul Sartre's home phone number and asked him to contribute. If I'd been 30, he might have said no, but I was a 15-year-old with passion and he was charmed. Making money was always just a side product of having a good time and creating things nobody'd seen before.

I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It's done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.