Paul Young

“I'm fascinated by the challenge of navigating the oceans.”

“For every musician there's a certain point when your kids get to 13 or 14 and you become an embarrassment. They don't want you to drop them off at school and they don't like that you are different from the other parents, but thankfully mine are over that now, and are pretty cool with what I do.”

“When people come and see Los Pacaminos the first time, the first couple of songs they're in shock. But it's pretty infectious and they'd have to be in a very bad mood to walk away and not like it.”

“A large part of me becoming a performer was a make-or-break way of getting over that stutter. I sometimes wonder if, subliminally, that was part of the reason I got into the business, and the more I became a performer and grew in confidence, the less pronounced the stutter became.”

“Growing up, we visited Devon and Cornwall where I learnt to surf and had my first horse riding lesson. We stayed in caravan parks and I have fond memories of Paignton and Newquay.”

“People think I can burst into song any time of the day, it's crazy.”

“I appeared three times with Jools Holland on 'The Tube.'”

“Rick James was a force to be reckoned with. He was an underground success here but huge in the U.S. - people used to compare him to Prince. Sadly, he had an early death.”

“My bajo sexto, a big Mexican acoustic guitar, comes from a shop in L.A. run by three generations of Mexicans.”

“Swimwear on TV is something I should have done in my 20s.”

“One of the main reasons people get bullied, in any walk of life, is because they are different. So I think that to throw kids in at the deep end when they are young is a good thing. It gets them used to other people and some of the things they will face. It takes them out of their comfort zone.”

“I performed at Live Aid in front of a worldwide TV audience of 1.9 billion but I wasn't nervous - the atmosphere was electric.”

“My mum said I used to sing on the bus. I was about five and would simply sit, staring out of the window, singing to myself. When I got to the end of the song and everyone gave me a round of applause, it scared me because I was in my own little world, but I obviously loved singing even then.”

“I wanted to do music at school but they discouraged it. If you did music you couldn't do technical drawing, which meant you couldn't work in engineering and as Vauxhall was the local employer that's what we were all being groomed for.”

“I was a dreamer as a kid.”

“The great thing about people in the '80s is there was a great zest for life. It was a really exciting era and the people who were around then are growing up very slowly. They almost don't want to!”

“When 'Wherever I Lay My Hat' went to number one in 1983, I was still driving a green Viva HC that my dad had given me. People would see me drive past and say, 'It can't be him,' but you don't get any money until about six months after a record is a hit.”

“In the early 1970s, I got a milling machine apprenticeship at Vauxhall in Luton. My dad was a pattern maker at the factory. He worked every day of his life there and my brother worked there, too. I remember the pamphlets on all the new models arriving home.”

“It makes no sense to me at all to give away music for free. The very fact that we have to do that cheapens the music. And there's a huge effect to that of music not playing such a big part in peoples' lives anymore.”

“The royalties from downloading are bad enough but the royalties from streaming are non-existent.”