If there are older black people in the audience that I can see I will not say the n-word. I know they grew up with a different meaning.
Still, the music was always there, and the lyrical capability was always threatening to show its head.
When you shake you ass, they notice fast. And some mistakes were built to last.
My dad worked in a very typical first-generation immigrant fashion - 24 hours a day for years.
[My mother] is much more musical, and by the time I started writing songs - by the time I was about 17 - she started to believe in me, musically.
I have definitely reached the same level as Madonna in terms of sales. I'm really pleased about that.
I was supposed to be a real Thatcherite. Just by dint of being a first-generation immigrant and having not had money, and then suddenly having it - and getting on planes and going to Ibiza and sitting around in thongs. But actually nothing I was writing or doing was even vaguely Thatcherite.
It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious
And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.
I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood - human blood.
Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.