There are moments, when you're playing your songs to thousands of people, which are amazingly satisfying. I'm very self-critical, so I find it hard to go along with moments like that.

Whenever we're on the red carpet, we look like competition winners. It's a joke.

The mixtapes, and a lot of our music, it comes from a place of fandom and appreciation and of respect and of nodding toward stuff that we feel really affectionate towards.

It was ages ago now, but when we started Bastille, I didn't necessarily want people to know or care if it was a band, and it came from a place, really, of just much rather having people listen to the songs rather than caring about the people making it.

The night that George Zimmerman was acquitted, I think, for black people all over the world, there was a collective feeling of incredible grief and incredible rage. And that verdict not only let George Zimmerman go home to his family, but it sent a message to black people everywhere that our lives did not matter.

I can do glamour, but I can also play something like I did in the play 'Wild Justice,' where I was demented with grief and anger, and there was snot coming out of my nose, and my clothes were all over the place.

If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.