Quotes from Jim Kerr

Our big songs were all songs that were never meant to be.

There's nothing that gives more satisfaction than playing live.

We have audiences within our audiences who only care about the greatest hits - but new material brings vitality to the set, and should stop you calcifying and being a museum piece.

When your band is no longer just your band but is an industry within an industry it can be a lot on youngish shoulders.

I sleep five hours, I get up at 4 A.M., I take three or four cold showers a day. I do things differently.

You don't get many periods in your life when it all goes your way.

It was great to see the Berlin Wall come down.

I really believe that if people put everything they have into something, they can really surprise themselves most of the time.

We have always been a big success as parents and I get on well, always have, with my exes - and had to because there were kids involved. Obviously they've had their own lives and their own marriages, as I have, but there's a knowing closeness. They are still family, really.

For any band to make it in America is a colossal challenge and very few do because it takes time and so much money to tour endlessly.

With hindsight, it is easy to understand why Nelson Mandela became a heroic symbol to an entire generation as he used his newly gained freedom to lead South Africa out of the shackles of apartheid.

When we were growing up the Barrowland was ominous. It had closed down. It was synonymous with Bible John.

We're honored - honored that we've been part of something that certainly, in terms of '80s pop culture in America, people have embraced.

If you're in a band, you can dress like a daft teenager for as long as you like. In fact, it's expected of you!

I think that dreamers are the most powerful people in the world.

How can Bono, having graced concert stages for over two decades, draped in the white flag of peace and screaming 'No More War' at the top of his lungs contemplate praising and back slapping Tony Blair?

Music is an organic thing. It's always progressing.

When we were starting, the only old guys you'd see on stage were blues guys. They played every night, feast or famine, skint, rich, in fashion and out. You didn't have to ask them about their lives, their dreams, it was written on their faces: that's who they were and that's what they did.

Glaswegians have always loved the finer things but with the emergence of good shopping and such like we're finding it easier to show what were really capable of.

By 1980, we'd been round Europe three or four times, and our eyes were wide open.

Punk was a very liberating force.

Being in the studio for the first time was a daunting process. I didn't know what the engineers did. A mix? What's a mix? We didn't know what we were doing, but fortunately, we knew people who did.

There is never going to be a band like The Who again.

I'm enjoying the frenetic pace of this changing world and yet within that hanging on quietly but quite stoically to the same thing I've always done.