“I grew to love the desert. The people who live there are independent and mad. I remember driving through it playing Handel’s Messiah, loud, and thinking: ‘This music is great in the desert.’ But then of course all religions have been born in the desert. Some bloke sitting on the bare surface of the earth contemplating the cosmos.

I’m not anti-religious though. In fact I think we are going to pay a heavy price for the decline of it. It’s why the green movement has taken off, I think. It’s a quasi-religion, it seems to me. That the apocalypse will all be down to our bad conduct, our bad behaviour. When I hear that I think: ‘Here we go again.’”