I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house and I just started for lack of a better term running free.

Right now it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.

Well Steve Vai joined my dad's band right around the time when I actually started playing guitar. So he gave me a couple of lessons on fundamentals and gave me some scales and practice things to work on. But I pretty much learned everything by ear.

One day my dad would say 'OK if you want to play tennis I can help you out.' And that's how it started. And I had a goal. I wanted to beat my mom first. And my parents and my brother. And that was the ultimate goal.

My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds and she did a few movies and she was really a great singer and when she married my dad and started to have a family she sang at parties.

I haven't really decided to be an actor yet! I started doing plays when I was about 15 or 16. I only did it because my dad saw a bunch of pretty girls in a restaurant and he asked them where they came from and they said drama group. He said 'Son that is where you need to go.'

When I was a kid my step dad started this business and would go out and get lost cows and stuff. He was part-time truck driver farmer and cowboy. He taught me how to ride from an early age.

After graduating from flares and platforms in the early 1970s I started drama school wearing a pair of khaki dungarees with one of my Dad's Army shirts accessorised by a cat's basket doubling as a handbag. Very Lady Gaga.

When I started writing I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

I met Gemma my wife when she was 12. She had a schoolgirl crush on me and her dad had arranged for her to meet me. Later she started coming to my concerts but I only got to know her well after her mother died. I rang to see how she was and that's how it started.