PERFORMING AS THE STREETS IS really fun now because there are so many songs to choose from. It doesn't ever feel like we're playing anything average. In the UK, everything is leaning towards indie bands at the moment and I feel lucky that I'm still kind of hanging on to relevance.

AT SCHOOL I WAS MUSICAL AND had good success with girls but I don't think you'd say I was cool. Nowadays, kids would have a MySpace page and the other kids would know about their music, but when I was at school that wasn't possible. You'd have had to play your songs to other kids and I certainly wasn't going to start doing that.

WHEN YOU'RE FAMOUS, YOUR perception changes a little bit and the sensations start to turn to loneliness. It's like getting a new car: you really want the new car, and on the day you get it it's amazing. After a year you don't really love that car and at the same time you can't get out of it. But I'm definitely not as famous as I used to be, which is quite fun.

MY NEW RECORD HAS A spiritual element. I like the philosophy of Schopenhauer, that we're all animals. The interesting thing is that all the facts point in that direction but we're still clinging on to the Christian ideal of a higher meaning, whether we go to church or not.

I REALLY LIKE BILL BRYSON'S A Short History Of Nearly Everything. I'm into the idea of novels but I just can't get through them. I tend to prefer non-fiction because you can take it piece by piece and each chapter has its own benefits.

I WANT TO END THE STREETS after the album I'm writing just now. I'd like to do a film that doesn't cost very much money. A lot of people would probably expect me to make a Mike Leigh film but I'm quite into mystery and mixing up the genres - not so much simple stories about simple people.

COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL therapy helped my dad a lot when he had problems. For me, the basics are that a lot of very light spells of depression are caused by our hanging on to bad thoughts - somehow we become quite compulsive about them. Cognitive behavioural therapy teaches you to just get rid of them and think good thoughts instead. It sounds almost silly but it works for me.

I'VE HAD PHOTOSENSITIVE epilepsy since the age of seven but the last fit I had was just before The Streets. It shaped my teenage years hugely. I couldn't really smoke weed, so I think I was a lot more motivated, and I couldn't play video games or watch telly for long periods because the telly worried me a lot.

MAKING MUSIC IN THE PERIOD leading up to The Streets was definitely hard because I had to worry about all those other things, like paying the bills. My last album sounded negative because there were a lot of things that didn't add up about fame, but I always thank the fact that I don't have to worry about money for now.

I'M CONSIDERING BECOMING A vegetarian again because of carbon - apparently, if we eat less meat we reduce our carbon footprint quite a lot. I'm not a mad greenhead because I think green people are still obsessed with humans. Humans are fairly inconsequential really, or as inconsequential as a cow, but I do kind of worry that the Earth is going to boil and everyone's going to die.

Interview by Paul Dalgarno

The Streets' new album Everything Is Borrowed is released tomorrow