Living in New York City for over thirty years, I ran into a lot of celebrities and nearly all of them were pretty decent people.

Lou Reed heard my girlfriend mention his name as he was leaving a gallery, and turned around, stopped and looked at us, literally tapping his foot -a clear message, "I'm leaving, so if you want to talk to me, now's your chance" She came over and said, "I just want to shake your hand," and he said, "Put it there!", and then they shook hands and he left. It was just awesome.

I wasn't there, but another girlfriend was walking down the street and smiled at someone she recognized and then said, "Oh, my god, you're Eric Idle," and he said, "Guilty as charged," and they chatted and he said, "I'm really early for my appointment thanks to your excellent subway, let's have tea," and they chatted like old friends for a while and then she said, "Oh, I have to go," and expected an attempt to get her number, because that's how men treat an attractive girl, but no, he was simply happy to hang out with some random person in the moment. What a sweetie.

Many people in New York had a David Bowie story, and they were all entertaining. In particular, on each recording project he made time to have an individual cup of tea with everyone who worked on it, even the interns, just to get to know them.

I paid Gibby Haines, the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers who has been famously difficult in the past, to headline a show of mine in some dump of a club, and he showed up on time, complained accuately about the lack of monitoring but went on anyway and let me play a couple of sets with him, and was generally a civilized and entertaining person.

I have other stories about composers like John Cage and Fredric Rzewski, three tech billionaires whose names you know, and quite a lot of others, and really, all good.

Funny, I'm a pretty cynical guy in general. I think I was lucky.