I don't really know any other musicians like me. I grew up backstage with my dad who played in a post-war dance band, so I always feel at home at a venue.
I was very lucky, I was part of the post-war period when everything had to be redone.
Of course, mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, were it not for two things: conquered Nazi rocket technology and post-war anti-Communist paranoia in the United States.
The blood and sweat shed by United States and United Nations troops proved to be the prime mover behind the realisation of freedom throughout the post-war period.
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.
The velocity and knee-jerk response to events happening in real time that television brings us precludes any kind of reflection or contemplation and therefore analysis. And that's been one of the greatest political dangers in the post-war era. The idea of the reasoned, thoughtful response goes out of the window.
'Collaborator' is a hostage tragicomedy, but it's also, kind of, everything I know about post-war America. Well, not everything, but it does reference a lot of the post-war period.
I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another.
All wars signify the failure of conflict resolution mechanisms, and they need post-war rebuilding of faith, trust and confidence.