I often find myself on my knees praying to something or someone to not be in control.

I go to a very visual place when I’m singing. It’s very cinematic and I get this feeling of space. I love when music does that.

In the early to mid-'90s, everywhere I turned, someone had died. It wasn't just people in bands. It was the people I was hanging out with. At some point, I thought, 'I may be heading down that road.'

There's that side of me that wants to be the loving, caring father, and there's the other side of me that's just a dirty animal. If I don't let that out, I go nuts.

It takes a long time to find your own voice. Along the way, you imitate all the things that influence you - in my case Johnny Cash, Bowie, John Lydon.

Depeche Mode have never got over their teenage awkwardness with each other. We're still like that. Mates but not mates. That awkwardness is there, only now we have families and kids.

When I was growing up in the early '70s and really getting into music, waiting outside the record store for that 45, waiting for a single from The Dead, The Clash, David Bowie, or T-Rex or something to be there. There was something about that that was so special.

L.A. is always great. There's something special about L.A. And New York, for me, because it's home. There's nothing quite like walking onstage at Madison Square Garden.

I always played around with writing songs, but when you're spending a lot of time in bars, you have a lot of big ideas, but you don't do much with them.

Growing up in a band is weird - you get stuck hanging on to what it is you think you are. But what I took into Depeche was that punk ethic, that you don't have to be accomplished to be a musician. If you've got ideas, you can do this.