There seems to be an inclination among rock musicians to be very carefree with money, but I negotiate the best flight and hotel deals on our tours to maximise the band's income - I don't want too see too much taken off the top line.
I'll go through the budgets for tours and recordings, royalty statements... You have to wise up about it a bit more.
I loved the 'Free Spirit' tour and the guys who helped create the magic: Pete Bullick, Rich Newman, Ian Rowley and Gerard 'G' Louis.
I want to release six songs, let people listen to those, let them chill for a second, do a tour, release another six songs, chill for a second and then take my favorite four, put them on the album, and add some more.
As far as the live shows go, we're not leapfrogging all the smaller venues. We would have bypassed these kind of shows and gone straight to the Arena shows, but we didn't want to.
It's very hard to tour.
I tried to get Primal Scream to come over to America several times.
I still felt we had some really good music on that record, but it's a shame that we couldn't make it better. And the tour was a total mess. We just had no life, no energy, and I felt we were going through the motions.
I'm not one for Sudoku or crosswords - the thing that fires my little brain is doing tour budgets.
I'd like to tour, but again, to tour my music now would take a bigger band.
Once you've been on tour six, seven years, you get an idea of what works and what doesn't work universally. There will be some crowds that we just can't play a song, but we've got 90% of a show that we know is going to be a hit with the Lupe Fiasco fan. I think the catering has already been done.
You can't get a good crew and a good sound system, and a good light system if you do a small tour. If you want the best, those guys want a commitment of about 4 to 6 months. And I'd want the best people and the best stuff.
When we can figure out a way to really tour and make a profit, then we'll do it again.
Each year when we set up a new tour, we kind of push ourselves to come up with new ideas and new exciting things.
I need to know how many records I've sold, how many album equivalents from streaming, which territories are playing my music more than others, because it helps me in conversations about where we're gonna be playing shows or where I might open a retail location, like a pop-up store or something.
When you put a tour together you really just think about who you'd like on your bill, who would make sense and who you would want to live with basically for a couple months and be around with and work with.
It's always hard to find groups who can tour with The Prodigy.
I think in 2016 I'm going to focus on performing a lot more and doing as many shows as I can. There's plans to tour more, and that's where my heart is - doing the live shows.
If we get a few solid festival shows then I will have no problem booking the lads for as many quality club shows around them to make a nice tour come together.
It's pretty scripted on the road: very organised and compartmentalised, and that's the way it has to be with so many people involved in a Stones tour.
Touring is a whole other animal for me and a whole other skill. But I'm having a lot of fun figuring all that out and switching it from internal to external and putting on a show.
A band requires so much rehearsal and travel logistics. I didn't mind it when I was younger, but there's not much motivation for me to do it now.
You open up a lot of tours making nothing just for the fact that you need to start somewhere and get some exposure. When you start to headline your tours, all the money is in headlining, but there's no money in headlining small rooms.
I'm usually going to make a record, finish a record, start a record or start a tour or between tours.
We plan tours months in advance, and you leave a few days off here and there where you feel you'll be tired after some shows, but if other opportunities keep coming in, those days get swallowed very quickly, and it's an impossibility to get this stuff right.
