“I hate alarms. If they go off I get really tetchy. I hate them. They just get me going, I'm hyper at the best of times, but they drive me mad.”

“'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.”