Vic Reeves

“Yeah, I was in a band called Trout.”

“People think they are not allowed to laugh at art, but they are. Damien Hirst laughs at himself. I know Jake and Dinos Chapman and they laugh all the time at what they do and at other artists.”

“I came up with the Vic Reeves character for a stage project and people presume that's my name, even when I do other acting jobs.”

“I love seeing people create.”

“I like to produce something every day. The easiest way to get ideas out is to put them on paper. I like to sit back at the end of every day and think, 'I created that today.'”

“The majority of people probably think that Damien Hirst is avant-garde. Look at the amount of people who say 'What is this rubbish? Who is running our galleries? Why are they spending all this money on the avant-garde?' That doesn't make it avant-garde to me.”

“Every day I'm in my studio - it's wooden and purpose-built at the end of our garden. It's filthy and has got paint everywhere.”

“Picking on people is not my sort of humour, but I think there's quite a lot of it around. We're slowly turning into a nation of bullies; manners have gone out of the window.”

“I do one painting per day, I've always done that.”

“You never, ever leave art school. It's important to keep finding inspiration. I look at YouTube videos and think, 'How would I do that?' I like experimenting with things. For instance, drying paintings off too quickly in a microwave can look strangely beautiful.”

“I cook every day and find it really relaxing. I've got a huge amount of cookery books. It's usually traditional British and French cooking, but then I'll go off-piste.”

“My mum used to paint and my dad did woodturning. We would spend our weekends at craft fairs and art galleries. That was just what we did. We were steeped in that world.”

“My playground growing up was the fields and forests.”

“I like to keep myself to myself. I like to stay in my house.”

“It was good fun being a pop singer. I had quite a laissez-faire attitude towards it which I think is why it worked.”

“A lot of things we take for granted sprang out of the 70s; it was a decade for thought and if a decade can be a mentor, then the 70s was mine.”

“That's the Daily Mail for you, they'll twist whatever you say and try and start a fight. They are terrible, awful gossip-mongers and troublemakers.”

“I have topiary.”