I have a very efficient publisher. Quarterly, I think it is, they send me a royalty statement and quarterly I make the same joke to my wife – "Here you are, darling, buy yourself something nice" – and then I spend it on, I don't know, a sandwich or a pint of beer. Does it bother me that the figure is invariably so low? Yes, but it isn't about the money. It's worth teasing out exactly what it is about. I've been teaching for twenty-five years. For the last ten years, I've been

In one of my last pieces, I promised to "keep you posted" but, in practice, what this generally means is me wandering happily from one preoccupation to another while trying to keep the intitial subject just about in view. (More than one student, while I'm teaching them, has shaken their head in exasperation.) So. Hyde Park last year. All day, people had been referring to something called Stevie Wonder; something that sounded like a cross between an explosion, a subset of one’

I'm going to let you into a secret. When I'm at the gym – when I'm on the treadmill, diligently throwing myself up virtual staircases – I don't just listen to music. I project myself into the music that I'm listening to. It could be "The Jean Genie", say, or "Get It On" or "What'd I Say". I'm onstage, playing with Johnny Marr; there's a charity concert or else it's a soundcheck and now I've got hold of the piano and I'm doing Ray Charles, I'm testifying, while surrounded by a

I have a new novel coming out in September. It's called Rough Music and I'm worried about its reception. Of course, this is a little previous. There might not be any reception. Still, how challenging – how dissonant – can you be these days? If it's not a risk, Annie Ernaux says, then it's not worth doing. But what constitutes a risk? I say this because the novel starts on VE Day. The narrator is what used to be called a roué. Or, more accurately, a would-be roué. He is unasha

Here's an adapted version of a piece that I wrote nearly three years ago: I was twenty-nine before I went to university. In my late teens and early twenties, I was in a band – I was fiercely in a band, the way that some people are helplessly tangled up in a relationship – and then, afterwards, I drifted into pub work. It was only when I found myself becalmed in a proof-reading office that I decided that it was time to go back and do what I should have done when I was younger.

As I've said before, my new novel, Rough Music, is coming out in September. Its launch will be in October, in The Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia. There'll be a string quartet then me; a soirée, but in a boozer. The Wheatsheaf is in the book. I like to think of the launch as being a scruffy version of one of those immersive things they do in galleries, like making you stand in the middle of Van Gogh's sunflowers. No matter how good it ends up being, though, it will almost certainly

I can't listen to Bruce Springsteen any more. His voice is on the wane. It's age, I know, and soon there'll be "the only end of age". It makes me sad. But it's here, I think, that one has to acknowledge a difference between your attitude to the performer and your feelings about his stuff. I like Bruce. If he ever wanted to pop over and discuss the finer points of Phil Spector or Gary U.S. Bonds I'd be delighted to make him a cup of tea. But I reserve the right to treat his ar