RAG'N'BONE MAN

I've got 99 problems, and most of them are height-related.

I've been writing a lot more folky, country type stuff. One of the reasons I wanted to write in the first place was because of Darrell Scott.

If someone asked if I I'd want no one to recognise me anymore, I'd take that option, I think.

I'm new to a lot of people, and I don't think anyone wants to listen to 16 tracks of a new artist.

At first, I didn't focus that much on the Internet. I was more, 'I'm going to write songs,' and I'd have sung that song out in a club, pub, or a jam session or whatever 10 times before I recorded it. We live in an Internet age, and if you don't embrace it, you get left behind a bit.

The inspiration for 'Human' came from a conversation. We stumbled upon this question: sometimes you think a problem is a problem when sometimes it isn't. And it takes you to have a little step back and realize you might be a bit dramatic.

People are obsessed by pictures these days. They just want to say they met someone, have the evidence.

I don't mind being recognised, as long as people are nice. I do like meeting people; it's just that some people are a bit disrespectful... Sometimes it's like, I'm having a roast dinner, and someone's taking a picture of me. I don't mind taking pictures, but just ask. Otherwise, it's a bit weird.

My mum always wanted to send me to a music school, but we didn't really have the money. So even now, I'm not a technically good singer. If you asked me to sing a particular harmony, I wouldn't know how.

Hip-hop was the music that actually got me excited about it and the actual prospect of performing. I think I loved music from an early age because my parents wanted me to love it as much as they did. It was constantly there.

Nobody told me how to sing, so I just thought I'd try and sing like Howlin' Wolf. It was like a bark; there was melody to it - but I would go off a bit and I wouldn't stick AutoTune on it or anything to make it in key. Even now, I couldn't tell you about harmonies. I couldn't tell about what notes I'm singing because nobody taught me to sing.

I used to go round to my granddad's house on a Saturday morning, and we'd sit and eat our porridge and watch re-runs of 'Steptoe and Son' on BBC Two. I thought it was hilarious - and Rag 'N' Bone Man sounded like a blues name to me. It reminded me of people like Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Mama Thornton.

Me and my dad used to go to these jam sessions and open mic nights, but I was always scared of singing on stage. It felt different to rapping - more pressured.

When you get to your teenage years, you want to find something that you identify with. It's almost a slight rebellion; you don't want to listen to what your parents listen to anymore; you want to find your own music. That, for me, was hearing the Fugees for the first time.

Rag 'N' Bone Man is for everybody, like Wu Tang is for the children.

I don't really like being recognised, to be honest. People say nice things and stuff, but I'm not really in it for that side of things. I just want to play music.

I used to sing as a kid, but it was quite squeaky. I think I was about 19 or 20, and we used to go to these jam sessions and open mics. I just got the courage to sing one day. I don't think anyone expected it to sound like that.

People have got no attention span these days with music - I come from the time where I bought the whole album and listened to it back to back.

The insomnia just perpetuates. I have one bad night, then I get it in my head that I can't sleep. I've been trying these meditation tapes - there are a couple on Spotify - and they're meant to calm you. But they don't seem to work.

I like the dirty venues better - Brixton Jams is like home.

Where I grew up, there was only one CD shop, and I didn't really like school, so we'd register, then bunk off, and we would be round my mate's house making drum-and-bass mix tapes.

I grew up in a little town called Uckfield, and there's not much to do - so we used to fight a lot. I was never in serious trouble, but we used to have the local bobby round the house saying, 'Rory's been up to this again.'

I wanted to write songs from the ground up, I wanted to sit at a piano and build around that. But I still have a lot of love for hip-hop, so I want to do more collaborations in that sense.

I had some really early recordings when I was 16 or 17. I was rapping over jungle beats with my friends. We used to do pirate radio stations in my area, down near Brighton. They were pretty terrible.

Close to my heart is Muddy Waters. I love the way he sang. It was almost like a bark. It was like the bark of a dog: it's not fancy. Sometimes it's not like singing; it's like shouting.