I immediately adored performing. It really empowers you when everyone's laughing. It gives you an immense buzz. You just feel on top of the world.

A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that is generated in the crowd and on stage. It's my favorite part of the business — live concerts.

The ultimate high for me is being onstage in front of an audience. Nothing else can compare.

The most beautiful thing about music is that it transcends most anything.

The magic of music is so strong, getting stronger, it should break any shackle of another art.

I love power like a musician loves music.

They bring my music to life.

Watching him, I understood for the first time how you could really live music, how you could listen to it completely and make it come alive, so that it was part of your life.

The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

You really should be able to feel the higher power of music and be moved by it, rather than listening to me waffle on and having to explain it.

Real music soars above class society.

At about the age of six or seven, I realized that of all the invisible powers the one I was destined to be most strongly affected and dominated by was music. From that moment on I had a world of my own, a sanctuary and a heaven that no one could take away from me. Oh, music! A melody occurs to you; you sing it silently, inwardly only; you steep your being in it;it takes possession of all your strength and emotions, and during the time it lives in you, it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse and sad in you; it brings the world into harmony with you, it makes burdens light and gives wings to to depressed spirits.

It was at this time, in the mid-sixties, that I first began to feel the power and spirituality I could connect with when I played in front of an audience. I'd been performing for ten years, but it was only at this time that I felt a kind of state of grace come upon me on those occasions when everything fell into place. At such times I would give a concert that everyone who witnessed it would remember for years, and they would go home afterwards knowing that something very special had happened. Those moments are very difficult for a performer to explain. It's like being transported in church; something descends upon you and you are gone, taken away by a spirit that is outside of you...That's what I learned about performing - that it was real, and I had the ability to make people feel on a deep level. It's difficult to describe because it's not something you can analyse; to get near what it's about you have to play it. And when you've caught it, when you've got the audience hooked, you always know because it's like electricity hanging in the air. I began to feel it happening and it seemed to me like mass hypnosis - like I was hypnotizing an entire audience to feel a certain way. I was the toreador mesmerizing this bull and I could turn around and walk away, turning my back on this huge animal which I knew would do nothing because I had it under my complete control. And, like they did with the toreadors, people came to see me because they knew I was playing close to the edge and one day I might fail. This was how I got my reputation as a live performer, because I went out from the mid-sixties onwards determined to get every audience to enjoy my concerts the way I wanted them to, and if they resisted at first I had all the tricks to bewitch them with.

I believe in the power of music to bring people together.