“I’m having more fun now than I did then.”

Do ever feel nostalgic for the days before the downturn in the music industry?

Yes and no. I mean, yeah, they were good times, but hey, we are living here now. And I’m having more fun now than I did then, and yet things are more fucked up now. I’m making more money now than I did then and yet I’m selling less records because people are downloading and sharing. It’s easy to look back. Everyone’s got their own golden period. But you know what? We should appreciate what we’ve got now, before it’s gone.

Do you ever get creative block?

No.

Never?

No. Because every day of my life is so varied, that in itself keeps things interesting. It feels like nearly every day I’m at the airport, going here, going there, meeting interesting people and hearing different sounds, being on that front line. If I was that kind of guy who just sits in the studio, never goes anywhere, makes beats everyday- you can run out of steam because you have no contact with the outside world. But music for me is the way I speak to the world. It’s my language. Maybe I did have that problem before, like, maybe in the ‘90s. But not now.

How did you deal with it back then?

Well you have to stop and do something else. You just hit a wall and think ‘oh fuck’. You move on, and then you have to go out. You just have to leave it alone. When you’re trying to force blood out of a stone, that’s basically what creative block is. You’ve got this idea and can’t take it any further. You’re up against this wall, and you’re pushing and pushing and the best thing is to leave it alone and go out, get drunk, do something totally different.

You mentioned your health troubles last year. Do you feel that that experience affected your approach to making music at all?

(Pauses). When tragedy knocks at your door I think there’s only two responses you can have; one is to be overcome, the other is to overcome it. I had a life-threatening form of cancer and I had a 40% chance of dying. For three weeks I thought about death every day and I would cry and…it’s crazy when that happens, when you think about it- death, that is. And it got to the point where I was like ‘if I die, I’ve lived a full life’. I don’t have any regrets. I’m 36 and in the 36 years of my life I’ve lived more than what other people see in a 100 years, maybe. I’ve been to 65 different countries, met so many different people, done so many different things. I was comforted by that.

I went into the operation and the operation was very risky and I survived. Some people said ‘but you came out of this operation and you did this album, why wasn’t the album really dark?’ Well it wasn’t dark because I lived. And when you live why should you be sad. I came out really euphoric, like I’d been given a second chance at life. So I try not to take life for granted. I try to actually relax more, try to interact more with people now than I did before. If we’d had this conversation ten years ago, I was really a workaholic then. I’m still a workaholic now, but I try to take more time off and spend time with friends and family. I think you realise you can work all your life, but y’know, all the stuff you work for, you can’t take when you die. Whether you’re religious or not, it doesn’t matter- you can’t take any of this away with you. So really what matters when you are lying there on your deathbed, I think, is the relationships that you’ve built up with people to give some meaning in your life- to know that you’ve done something that’s meant something and can leave a lasting legacy as a creative person.