The only time I’ve seen any rebellion was in the fifties, sixties and early seventies. The rest of it you can keep.

If there is a God he hasn’t been paying attention. He should retire and hand over to a younger man, because he’s making a real bollocks of everything.

So I peeked under the tent-flap and there was Tommy, stark naked with his clothes under his one arm, running like a maniac. Following closely behind was a furious Guide mistress beating him on the head with his own arm!

People don’t become better when they’re dead; you just talk about them as if they are.

I like girls. That’s the only reason I’m in the music business – I discovered you could get women to take their clothes off if you had a guitar. And they come off a lot faster if you can play it.

My ethic is: ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ You can be as careful as you want, but you’re going to die anyway, so why not have fun?

We were a blues band, really. Although we played it at a thousand miles an hour, it was recognizable as blues – at least to us it was; probably it wasn’t to anybody else.

Integrity is everything to me. I will not die ashamed. I will live on my deathbed knowing that I gave it my best shot, and everything else is meaningless to me.

People don’t want to see the guy next door on the stage, they want to see a being from another planet. You want to see somebody you’d never meet in ordinary life.

You haven’t been soiling your soul in public for years like we have.