What sort of story are you telling us on "Rancho Tetrahedron"?

It's a very fragmented story. It began with me spending most of six months in America and tasting the isolation of the Southern Californian consumer lifestyle. There are songs which are about the apocalypse that could result from that, and there are songs about the kind of forgotten parts of history and the environments I've lived in like Britain and Ireland, and a lot of reflections about the impermanence of prosperity. What happens when prosperity is over. There's quite a lot of that. But it's not about the right or wrong about that. It's just about what could happen.

Some of the characters in it seem to be pretty unsavoury in a similar way that a lot of J.G. Ballard types are unsavoury. Is he as a writer still there in your framework of influences?

Well, I read a lot of Ballard when I was in my late teens. I suppose that might have stayed with me. But I think the reason I do things the way I do them - I just don't find the positive aspects of human nature very inspiring to write about. So I tend to focus on what can happen when peoples' freedom to do the right thing is restricted. I think that's probably the main thing I have in common with Ballard. It's quite easy for people to be generous and kind when they've got enough to eat but when they don't things can be different.

The lovely word terylene pops up a couple of times.

The reason it is in the title of that song, "Terylene Ghosts in the Sunshine", is that nobody in America or any of American's satellites nowadays would be seen dead wearing anything so unglamorous as a terylene garment because we're all dressed for the beach all the time, or for sports we don't play. So, terylene ghosts is a kind of reflection on what would happen if you hallucinated the existence of unglamorous figures from the early parts of the 20th century in the idealised landscape of the sunkissed parts of Southern California now.

I also really like the Gingham cellphone.

You can add anything to a cell phone. You can encrust it in diamonds. It's a big status object but you must only keep it for nine months. Then you get the next one.

A lot of the songs, sound-wise, seem to be closer to French chanson then anglo-saxon singer/songwriting type things. Is that a fair observation?

It probably is. I try not to sound like an anglo-saxon singer/songwriter, using any tools at my disposal. And I went through a big period two or three years ago and a couple of years before that listening to a lot of French varieté music - the more intellectual end of it, I suppose. But really, I'm a sucker for anything. My French friends sneer at my liking of Claude Nougaro, for example. He's not regarded as an intellectual by anybody, he's regarded as an idiot. But that's the positive aspect of cultural ignorance, really, you can be inspired by things that don't stand up to analysis from within their own cultures.

However, for this record, when I was writing it, I was listening to a lot of the Russian - what they call "Shanson", which is S.H.A.N.S.O.N. It's horrible music. It's a bit like Russian Romance, which is another style, but it's more low-brow. And it's kind of like Russian Ganster Rap. There's a lot of lyrics about spending time in the gulag, the criminal gulag rather than the political gulag. When I was in California I was ordering CDs of this stuff from Brighton Beach and Coney Island in New York. I found it quite inspiring. I love music from Asia Minor. A lot of Turkish and Greek music, especially Kardes Türküler and Savina Yannatou, people like that. Those are the things that inspired me. They had a dynamism that isn't just the 4/4 third-generation-son-of-Chuck-Berry-stuff which is what so much anglo-saxon music still is. You can take away the 12-bar, you can take away all the major chords, you can stop resolving any chords, and yet it's still got that same rhythmic pulse. That's what I aim to get away from.

How did you get into Russian Shanson?

To be perfectly honest, I can't remember. I think it was a magazine article I read somewhere. The good thing about California is that the multi-culturalism is really strange. You still have a colour bar in the United States - in many ways - and it manifests itself strangely. A lot of suburban white kids buying a lot of Rap music, but still their take on cross-cultural pursuits is not the same as it is in the UK. So you might get a page written in the New Yorker about Shanson, or Reggaeton, kinds of music that not necessarily mean all that much in Western Europe. I'm always on the lookout for things like that. Nothing bores me more than to hear re-iterations of things that I discovered years ago. I still listen to that music, but I don't necessarily wanna read about it. I wanna read about things I've never heard.

What's the latest stuff you've read about and you hadn't heard before?

I'm going through a real mainstream - ha! - phase at the moment. The album I enjoy most at the moment is Ariel Pink's "Haunted Grafiti" album which I think is fantastic, which I wish I'd thought of myself twenty years ago.

You do mean this?

Yeah, absolutely I do. He's taken that music to a place where it should have gone straight away. Bad digital technology being employed to sound unmusical and odd.

Funny, I had a conversation about that very album with Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters last week.

Oh, really. Does he like it?

He loved it. Raving about it. So I came home and listened to it and thought: what the fuck's this?!

Yes, that's quite a sensible reaction, really. He takes all the commonly recurring parts and sticks them back together again in a really, really fucked up way. Deeply, deeply disturbed. It's outsider art, done using materials that aren't normally used for that.

But let's face it, mainstream it isn't.

No, it's not mainstream. But I also like bits of the Paul Weller album and bits of the Gorillaz album, things that last year, really, I wouldn't have given the time of day to. I don't know what it means. I've recently got this big collection of obscure Scandinavian contemporary composers that I haven't even checked out yet because I've been listening to the normal stuff. I don't know why.

Is it just the boredom of this 4/4 business that makes you want to get as far away as possible from this anglo-saxon singer/songwriter business?

It's partly rhythms that I just don't find dynamic any more when they're played by most people. Although the Paul Weller thing isn't exactly full of strange rhythms and I like that. Things like that can still move me. Mainly, it's a political thing. I don't wish to be associated with the music of globalisation any more. I've put my foot in it in the past and I don't want to put my foot in it again. That's mainly what it's about. I can't give up on the idea that it is possible to do something that people haven't heard before, to some degree, in some modest way, you know. And that's still what motivates me. I don't want to be like all those other wankers.

One thing that makes the Weller album a bit different, sonically, is that he has a lot of different textures he works with. Like there's suddenly some really mad piano solo for 3 ½ seconds somewhere. You do a similar thing. There's some really strange instrumental combinations on the album, isn't there?

Well, I post-processed things quite a lot. This time I was able to engineer a lot of it - not all of it - but a lot of it myself. This meant that I was free to basically take segments of things people had played and run them backwards and in the wrong place. Things like that. I enjoyed doing that this time. I don't know that I could do a whole record that way. I mean the Weller record is definitely like that. But I think he's got somebody else who does that. I think you need a bit of distance, a) to do it well, and b) to not have a nervous breakdown trying to make your brain dealing with all that detail. Or else, just do it really really really fast so that it doesn't become - it doesn't take over your consciousness. I think there is such a thing as taking the digital thing too far. I've kind of gone right into it and then gone right out of it a number of times over the years. I think that will continue to be the case as long as there's electricity. When there isn't electricity it won't be an option. Ha!

How easy it is in London to find the sort of musicians who can play this sort of stuff, who get what you want to do with your songs?

I'd imagine that it would be quite difficult, but I'm lucky in that I've had this nucleus of people for ten years now. They're all trained to some degree, much more so than I am myself. And that means that they can - if they choose to - basically do exactly what I ask them to do. I sometimes think I've fallen into a bit of a trap of rating that really highly and that it would be better to open up to the foibles of people who maybe are more limited. But my living circumstances really have been such that I can't give any project the amount of time it would take to incorporate that and edit it and give people the space to do it. I need to be able to work pretty fast - even though it's spread over long periods of time. So I'm really lucky to have the people I have, really.

Who are they? What's their backgrounds? How did you come across them?

Well, there is the James Woodrow person who is the guitarist. He plays - he's kind of the number one or number two contemporary classical guitarist in the UK. He also plays acoustic classical guitar. He's played with Gavin Bryars for many years, he played for a time with the London Sinfonietta, he plays in Icebreaker which is a contemporary music group which specialises in Minimalist music, particularly Dutch and New York Minimalist music. Audrey Riley, cellist, also plays in Icebreaker, and she's a string arranger of considerable renown, she's worked a lot with Coldplay, Muse, and Feeder and people like that. Nick Allum, the drummer, he's played with me for years, he was in Fatima Mansions, he played a bit with Dave McComb and some other Australian people like that, and Danny Manners, the bassist, he's played a lot with Louis Philippe, and he played with Happy End who were a kind of Brecht/Weill specialist group in London in the 80s and the 90s. Also on the record I have Oliver Knights, one of the singers from Turin Brakes. He recorded the rhythm section on most of the record and also sang backing vocals, big big backing vocals on a couple of songs. And my old friend Dawn Kenny from Ireland who's a singer and piano player and arranger, she sings on three songs. And for the live shows that are coming up I've got a new keyboard player, Michael Halewood, people won't know him so much.

On the album, all the keyboard stuff is yours?

Yeah.

There's some pretty neat stuff there!

Well, I cheated here and there.

You meet the band, The Grand Necropolitan Quartett, whenever there's a concert or an album to do, perhaps once every six months, once every year. Do you ever miss having the dynamics of a band where you are constantly together and exchange ideas?

I do. But mainly when I've been doing a stint, saying goodbye to everybody and realising I'm not gonna see some of them for maybe two years again. Maybe we won't all be around after that much time. Yeah. It's at times like that that I miss it. And, yeah, I probably would benefit more from an exchange of ideas. I do miss knocking about with music people all the time. But on the whole it's not too bad. It could be a lot worse. I could be geographically separated to a point where I don't have people on my wavelength at all. That would be a lot worse.

How do you remember your Fatima Mansions times?

Mixed emotions really. You always think of the most dramatic times, and they weren't all good. I wish it would have gone on longer. But I'd run out of ideas as the song writer sometime before the end. It had to happen the way it did, really. Just trying to move on.

How did you refresh your song writing ideas after Fatima Mansions?

I just took the most different approach that I could, which was to go back to interlocking melodies rather than rhythmic ideas and noise. Those things were kind of - not banished from my vocabulary, but moved down a bit in their prominence.

Basically, when the Mansions finished, we'd gotten caught up in all that alternative boom that truned into Grunge and got ridiculously overblown. I found that the only music I was listening to at the end of that was the Post-Rock stuff that was starting to seep out of Chicago in the wake of Steve Albini's people, and English Folk-Rock. What I really found was that I could hear more musical inspiration in even a bad track with Danny Thompson playing bass on it than I was hearing in anything from the last few years in the rock environment. I had to strip things back anyway so the sounds I was really messing around with as my palette were nylon string acoustic guitar, double bass and a stripped back drum kit, some piano. Particularly for the "Black River Falls" record I was working with that, really, and I haven't strayed all that far from that since, really. Up to that point I now felt I'd been fiddling around so much with so many different toys. The recordings of some of those Mansions things haven't aged as well as they might have done if I'd been more disciplined and direct about things. Certainly the emotional impact of some of the things was dulled a bit by the fact that everything had to have all that overload going on. So, it's the emotional impact I've tried to retain in the last decade. It's a DECADE - JESUS CHRIST! Ha!

It's twenty years since the beginning of Fatima Mansions!

It is. It's more, actually. 21, or 22.

What's your memories of the Microdisney days?

I look back on Microdisney with a lot of regret. Because I feel that for a variety of reasons we didn't work as much as we could have done. And I could have achieved a lot more, creatively, because I think Sean O'Hagan and I have subsequently both shown there was a lot more to either of us than we showed in Microdisney. I just regret that we didn't get to more of that as a partnership. I can only speak for myself - I was just very quick to feel the antagonism in any situation in which I found myself, and not look on the glass as half full, and say: "well, this record deal isn't really working out - but look, we've got this money in the bank, that gives us a bit of breathing space, we can go and secretly record some stuff that we like for ourselves and when this crappy record deal is over we can just get on with that". That kind of thinking was just completely not there. I was certainly guilty of tunnel vision and I bitterly regret that from those times.

But some times I guess you have to go into a place where there appears to be nothing at all going on in order to get your consciousness working. Maybe if I hadn't been so disaffected I wouldn't have discovered Sandy Denny's music in 1987 which was the springboard to a lot of things that I did much later on. We both always really liked Richard Thompson, but somehow it was only when I heard Sandy Denny that I made connections that sustained me. There was more kind of - I won't say "dissonance", but more a kind of harmonic tension going on in her work than in Richard Thompson's. Though I still respect both enormously.

Aren't you a bit hard on yourself there? Everybody at the time was young, the music business was very different, everybody was trying hard to find their own way and nobody had a sense that they stood above it all and knew what they were doing. You couldn't really have done anything different, could you?

We started off with the view that we were above it all and I think it stood to us. I think the good work that we did was the product of having this really snotty-nosed attitude towards what was going on around us and going: "Right, we're not going to have anything to do with that." But gradually it seeped into us. I think for us, as for a lot of people, it was just the result of technology. Suddenly technology was capable of all those things that even 3, 4, 5 years previously had only been a pipe dream. And what's more they had been a pipe dream of the avant-garde, primarily. So there was literally a phase when you couldn't distinguish between what was genuine experimentation and genuine ground-breaking work, and what was just the mainstream re-asserting itself in a different way. And of course with hindsight we can see that nearly all of it was, the latter, the mainstream re-asserting itself. There was only a period between 1978 and 1980, really, when that stuff was being played. After 1980 it was all about ABC and The Human League and everybody "taking it to the market place". And it was in that kind of funny period from when the likes of PIL and the Gang of Four appeared, until 1980, when people were being radical with that stuff.

You said a moment ago that you had a really good antenna for everything being against you in the 80s. Why?

I gave it too much importance. I really gave it too much headspace. Somehow - again, I must say, I'm only speaking about myself - I wasn't able to carry with me the independence of spirit that I had when I had nothing to when I had a little bit. Somehow the process of getting a record deal changed my way of thinking. It happens to most people. But I just wished it hadn't happened to me. Or a lot of those other people, too. The 80s could have been a really good time. And in some ways it was. Things continued to be produced that were really interesting. I mean - the Mekons continued for one thing, got better, in fact. And they weren't alone. A lot of the big explosion of noise music at the end of the 80s was the result of the fact that people who'd kept that spirit going. Sadly, I wasn't one of them.

The last ten years you have - almost, not quite - operated outside the music industry as we know it.

Oh, yeah.

You've gained a sort of freedom you probably didn't have in the 90s.

Yeah. I met people who gave me opportunities in things like music theatre and in the commissioned arts world. I can't claim it's been financially lucrative but it did change my way of thinking. If only something like that happened to me sooner it would have done me a lot of good. But I'm glad it's happened to me at all. Without that I probably would have stopped.

What do you mean by the "commissioned arts world"?

I have done three productions with a music theatre company in France whose directors found me through some kind things that had been written about me in an encyclopaedia of rock in French. So we forged contact over the internet at a time when that wasn't the ubiquitous thing that it is now. We were fortunate it worked for us. So I've done three productions with them. Hopefully we'll be able to do some more. And in my own writing, I was commissioned to write a song cycle in Ireland in 2005 which sustained my work for I guess about a 2, 3 year period around then and again gave me a different perspective. I have some regrets about the way I used to opportunity but on the whole it was a very positive experience. Definitely a lot easier than trying to do what I do, finding a label. Even though the new record is on a label, for the first time in three albums of mine. It's my old miscreants at Kitchenware. There aren't too many other labels I would entertain a relationship with at this point.

How has the internet affected what you do and how you do it?

Some things have got a lot easier, some things have become practically impossible as a result of the internet. The instant access means the kind of limited exposure that used to be a part of the creative process when I was forming my idea of what I did isn't there any more. People expect instant access, they expect ubiquity, something is wrong with your attitude if you don't want to be ubiquitous. I have a real problem fitting in with that. But I do, fitfully. It's a medium I know very well because I'm quite involved with it in other parts of my life. So I don't find it to be a stone wall, but as with most other people I know I don't know where it's taking the process of making music. I don't know where it's going to settle, or if it's going to settle, in our lifetimes. For example, is something like Spotify the future? No stacks and stacks of CDs or vinyl or MP3s in your physical environment any more, you just switch on your subscription service and you've got everything you'd ever wish to hear? Is that the future? Or is there even any kind of future?

I get infuriated with the internet utopians who say the lack of any way of charging for music is actually going to make things better. Just because every U2 tour breaks records for the amount of money generated, in their minds that seems to mean de facto that live music scene is doing phenomenally well. That's just a big big lie. I don't begrudge any of those monster acts the money they generate because I think they generate most of it from an audience that isn't otherwise interested in music. They're forging their own way of doing things. Fine, I don't have a problem with that. But you can't extrapolate from that to somebody like me, or even a young band that's trying to get somewhere by writing their own material and doesn't have rich parents, doesn't have a major publishing deal, doesn't have any of the secret sources of income that have sustained people, and still sustain some people. What are they supposed to do? Especially if they want to do something that's a bit out of the ordinary. It's not about whether there will be another Rolling Stones. I worry - will there be another Big Black or another Nirvana, even.

I was talking with Peter Gabriel about this in the context of his Real World label. He said that the development was really worrying because most of the Real World artists up to this point had made most of their money from CD sales. Now, they're not selling CDs any more and Gabriel speculated that half the people who are making music today just won't be able to afford to make music in future, especially in Africa, Asia and South America.

Obviously it's on those kinds of margins that it really matters. Because that's the source of true vitality. For every one Lady Gaga that manages to do something vaguely entertaining within the mainstream, even now you've got fifty acts that just shift loads of records but don't have nothing at all special about them. The vitality has always been on the edges. It's doubly cruel if the new technology helps stamping out indigenous cultures in the developing world - or their pop aspect at least.

You came out of Ireland at a time when the Irish music scene seemed especially innovative, with a lot of different things going on. What's it like now?

I'm not in sufficiently regular contact with Ireland to have an opinion that matters much, but it seems like there are still people who are really doing quite odd things, but they don't find it so easy to get heard. It's like anywhere. You can get into the blog-world, and if what you're doing matches a certain demographic then you may find an audience that way. I'm supposed to do this spoken word thing for a Dublin band called Readers' Wives who I think are pretty good, they've got a pretty strange take on the world. They sustain themselves as a rock band. I think the infrastructure hasn't died off as rapidly as the Irish economy in general has been sucked under. I think there's still more of a framework there then there was when Microdisney was trying to get by there and had to abandon the place. There's still more of an infrastructure. But it doesn't seem to be as exciting as it did for a while in the late 80s and the early 90s where there was just beginning to be this underground there and friends of mine were doing pretty wild things and having a really good time. I don't think people - as in their general lives - are finding it so easy. But, you know, they have a dole system which isn't as judgmental as the UK one. That's got to be a positive thing particularly for younger people who don't have dependants who're trying to do adventurous music.

It seems to me from the outside, that fewer bands manage to get outside Ireland. Hot Press is full of young bands, but even in Britain we barely ever hear any of them.

I think that's to do with the glut, not with Ireland. It's gotten easier for everyone. There's more Chinese equipment to use to make music with, so there's a colossal wall of noise, not much of it worth hearing, coming from everywhere. But, you know, Villagers are nominated for the Mercury Prize, and Fionn Regan gets around a bit, and there's a singer from Waterford called Rebecca Collins who's come over here and is really good. There are still people coming out of there alright.