All I noticed was that something would happen to people when I sang, I found that people noticed me more when I sang.

If I've got a talent, it's for picking the right song at the right time for the right audience. And I can always seem to get people to sing with me.

My friends liked it. My family liked it. I thought, 'If they all like it why can't everyone like it?' I knew I could get an audience.

Our fans were often the same age as us, and we would prove to ourselves and them that we were the real punks. We were zealots of a kind with a determination not to surrender our values to the big cities, but rather bring them our true punk values like respect for the people who were paying to see us. We’d make it our business to stop and talk, to sign autographs. We wanted to fuse with our audience in the way no punk band had been able to. And as the singer, I had to create that fusion, to make a chemistry set of the crowd, by rubbishing the very idea they were a crowd. This was not just a nucleus of unstable atoms banging into each other; this was a gathering of sentient beings who for those few hours every night played the most important role in the drama, transporting the band and therefore themselves to some place neither had been before. Finding some moment that none of us had occupied before, or would ever again.

Since after all, it is the crowd who pays,
Why not content them when you write your plays?

I suspected there would be a good-size crowd once the word got out about my hanging.

During secondary school days, I started entertaining my friends during lunchtime...I had a sort of request songs and I would sing.

You have to be someone large on stage, not who you are in your everyday life. When I was performing, I believed that every song told a story, which I expressed through singing and movement. My audience wanted theater, and that's what we gave them. You start out not knowing who they are, or how active they will be, but you want to impress them. If they were quiet and they didn't move, then we had to work together, me, the girls, and the band, to pull them in and show them how to have a good time.

Sure, I wanted men to like me, but the women were something special. They'd come around the bus after the show and they'd ask to talk to me. They felt I had the answers to their problems because my life was just like theirs. Of course, it was impossible to find time to talk to each one or to answer every letter that came along. I ain't Dear Abby with nine secretaries answering the mail. Besides, I had a few problems maybe they could have solved for me. Sometimes I think some people were disappointed when they met me and found out I wasn't any smarter or happier than they were. I'm proud and I've got my own ideas, but I ain't no better than nobody else. I've often wondered why I became so popular, and maybe that's the reason. I think I reach people because I'm with 'em, not apart from 'em. It's not the fancy clothes I wear, or the way I fix my hair, and it sure ain't my looks because I don't think I'm anything special. It's the way I talk to people. You can tell when you meet somebody — in their eyes, or the way they stand — if they think they're above you or below you. After I was performing for a while, I got to like being with a crowd. I loved to get right down with 'em, with a long cord on my microphone, if I could. And if I was at a state fair or something, where they put you too far from the audience, I'd say, "This ain't the way I like it."

Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in the country was thinking. And this has held me ever since.

I didn't expect such a huge reaction, but I knew I was doing something different to everything else that was happening at the time ... People feel a very personal connection with the music.

Those audiences are my critics. They tell me right away! I learnt very early on how far I can go, what I can and can’t say on stage. They inspire the stories that I tell, and how I tell them. It has to be something that the core can relate to. And what I’m finding is that if you serve the core, it grows, and you find a whole new audience.

A lot of songs will do justice to how a lot of people are feeling, and it is good for the time regardless of the situation.

I needed to sing because nobody else was singing my songs.