"On his first Ferrari: Yeah. It was instant disappointment. Nick Mason said to me once, ‘Chris, do yourself a favour. Stop trying to make excuses about all this. You’re a sad bastard. It could have been heroin. But it’s red cars.’ And he was right. There was nowhere to drive the fucking thing. Y’know, you put it in your garage. You didn’t want anyone to know you had it. Then you take it out, and you couldn’t find anywhere you could do more than 40 miles an hour. I’m a competent driver. I’ve raced at Monza. But it’s a terrible thing. Blues guitar and motor racing bring out real testosterone in some guys."

“On his neglect of being a rock star: There’s a certain discipline about being a rock star, and I don’t have it. If I was a rock star, I wouldn’t have let a photographer in here, dressed like this. I’d have been down the hairdressers. You try and get Sting to do something without 15 advisors. These boys are like Russian princes...”

“On blues in the music industry: You say that word ‘blues’ to anybody in the business – and they fucking run a mile. It’s unbelievable. I had a lot of trouble with Road To Hell. We’d actually recorded the next album – Auberge – before, as an agreement with Warner Brothers. So if Road To Hell didn’t work – and they said it won’t – we would jump straight away to Auberge and forget about it. Of course, the beginning to Road To Hell is a gospel-blues thing. Warner Brothers went, ‘This is going to be over in five minutes’. But I did stand me ground, and it went No.1.”

“On modern blues: Me and the modern blues scene, we have difficulty getting on. I sometimes get the feeling that it’s all sixth-form college: ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do that.’ A lot of modern blues is academic. It’s what someone else did. But the blues is one of the biggest examples of evolution. It’s in constant change. You can’t document it and say ‘stop’. It should be free. And has become some kind of technical thing. I’m fed up now of seeing, ‘Oh, this guitarist is faster than that guitarist’ – that’s got nothing to do with the fucking blues. Then you get guys who come along like Allman’s nephew : now that’s good. Fuck me. That’s what blues should be: something you haven’t heard before. The other stuff can get a bit like... you know when you fart in the bath? These scales get so fucking fast. Musically, emotionally, it ceases to do anything.”

“On the disappearance of "rock star" hysteria surrounding him: I took it rather better than some of them I could tell you about, who had nervous breakdowns because they’re not the king any more. I found fame really annoying. Anything to do with ‘celebrity’, I just don’t get.”

“On the artist, Charley Patton, who changed him: What happened was I was going out on a Saturday night, so I went into my mam’s bedroom, she’s got a double mirror, really kitsch 50s. So I’m in there, doing that, and she’s got an old alarm clock where the radio comes on, but she never learned how to do it properly. And it came on. I remember it was ten past three in the afternoon and it was winter, it was getting dark, and it was when the BBC had just started doing Telstar live things from America. It was some station in Memphis - one of those classic names, ‘RK 51’ or whatever. On it came and there’s this record. The satellite thing was a bit cloudy and it was a 78 record and there was compression on the radio, so it was this strange kind of musical blur with this voice coming through: Charley Patton. On that night I told the bass player of one of the local bands that I’d heard this record and it sounded weird, it sounded like a violin. He said, ‘No, it’s not a violin, it’s a slide guitar.’ I thought, ‘What’s one of them?’”

“On media consideration to be a reluctant rock star: I'm not a reluctant rock star, I am not one at all. I haven't an ounce of rock star in me. What I despise about the rock star lifestyle is the lack of music in it. The average day is spent travelling to hotels, giving interviews, being nice to people you're told to be nice to, and maybe if you're lucky you might squeeze a bit of music in. The musician's day is music. I am in that unique little club, where I went into music because I love music, not because I wanted to be rich and famous. I've always knocked on the door of the musicians' room, not the rock stars' room. The British press refuses to see the difference between them, mainly because of the capers of people like Phil Collins, a musician who behaves like a rock star. But there are people who love music and have no interest in being a rock star at all.”