Deep thinkers take the biscuit

It's Saturday morning and I'm sat in a darkened radio studio talking to a gloomy-looking Glaswegian rock star. His face is obscured by sunglasses and a hoodie. Everything about him screams "I'm deep and poetic and expect to be taken seriously".

Naturally enough, this provokes me into asking questions that demonstrate how un-seriously I take him. "So, your album's at number one, your lyrics have been compared to Dylan's and you've an army of obsessive disciples who seem to think of you as some sort of messiah. But what we really want to know is, what's your favourite sort of biscuit?"

He strokes his chin and says, "Hmmm…let me think about that." "Fancy that!" I think to myself. "He really is thinking about how to answer my question properly!"

Personally, whenever I'm asked a question, I tend to think about the answer as little as possible. Thinking about it only muddles my brain. I figure that if you answer a question fast enough, then follow it up with a bit of distracting babble, then no-one really notices if it makes any sense or not.

Eventually, this moody rocker stops fumbling around inside his head and says something like, "I don't know." By this point, of course, I (and most of the listeners) have completely forgotten what the question was. I'm no Terry Wogan, but even I know there's no place for long silences and short answers on the wireless. "If I was him I'd have probably started singing a saucy limerick or at least doing a Donald Duck voice by now," I think to myself.

Just goes to show: it doesn't matter how good at guitar you are - if you're too much of a thinker, you'll go nowhere in show business. ·