Graham Parker

I went to Morocco, joined a band called Pegasus, ran out of money, went to Gibraltar and worked on the docks, writing songs about the sun and the morning and the birds.

Oh, man, pop singers are terrible actors. We're all bad.

I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that.

When I was a kid in the mid-'60s, I was what's known as a moddie boy, a prototype skinhead. You all had your hair like a crew cut, cropped, with suits or Levis with red suspenders, sometimes Doc Martens. It was a thriving soul music, Motown and ska scene; we used to dance to Prince Buster and the Skatalites.

I never learned music. I'm quite uneducated, and usually I sat in front of the TV, with soap operas on, in England. It was very inspiring for me, I'd done all this traveling around, I came back living with my parents, everyone around me was like they're living in a soap opera.

Mostly I've never let record companies become involved with my music, which was a very smart thing that my first manager Dave Robinson did, to keep them out of it.