You may be right that people say: 'You know what we had Obama. He was inexperienced. The guy had great rhetoric sounded good looked good but has turned out to be an utter disaster. I want someone where I have confidence and credibility that they're up to the job and that I can trust what they tell me.'

Both my grandmothers had upright pianos and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once and I could play it.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989 my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me. I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength until the only thing I could do was walk away.

Drums just always sounded like the most fun part of that good music for me.

That was a time when I did love music I couldn't get enough of what was going on. Maybe it was Nirvana that brought me back. I guess it was a comfort because something that sounded so right - and non-commercial - had become so influential so immediately.

In the morning on Sunday a drum is sounded at about 8 o'clock.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Back then I didn't think a woman like that or a relationship like that could exist with complete freedom and no jealousy or possessiveness. I thought it sounded too good to be true and I was certainly convinced it wasn't the life for me!

Unfortunately the real achievements of children on the ground became debased and devalued because Labor education secretaries sounded like Soviet commissars praising the tractor production figures when we know that those exams were not the rock-solid measures of achievement that children deserve.