I recognize that as a musician there is a certain chauvinism attached to it, which is the thing of, "I spent my time learning how to play. You didn't spend time learning how to play, therefore, you are not a musician."

Singing, it's like it's like loving somebody, it's a supreme emotional and physical experience.

Especially when you've got your own mail route, day after day, it was an easy place to write. It was like going to a library with no books. You're afforded to just go do your job, and you don't really even have to think about it. You know you're on the right street and you're at the right house, and you're putting the mail in the right box. That's where I wrote a lot of the early songs, walking on the mail route.

I knew Fred since I was 14 and was first going to the Old Town School, Fred used to work part-time in the store. Every time I wrote a song Fred would turn on his really good high-class tape recorder, reel-to-reel, and record it. So he's got recordings of me on guitar singing all my songs in his apartment long before I ever recorded for a recording company. I never found out what happened to the tapes.

Even when I was a mailman. That job required no great skill, so once you got it down, you had a lot of free time to daydream and make up songs.

I went to Ealing Art School, in London, the year after Pete Townshend left. Music was a sideline to everything we did, and the school was a breeding ground for musicians.