The Nordic theme, I´m intrigued...

Norway is a place that my compass often points to. In fact, my wife, Michèle, also has developed an appetite for Norway, and she started making images of old Norwegian glaciers, one of which is on the cover of the album. She´s making them lenticular, which means they look like 3d ones, they shimmer. They´re kind of exotic. I think Norway crops up in a lot of my songs for various reasons. I first went there in 1982, and "Goodnight Oslo" is a reflection of that.

It´s a semi-nostalgic reverie, that song, isn´t it?

Like most songs it´s a feeling. It´s a feeling in a bottle. You can´t necessarily define them except by giving them their titles. For me they´re like slices of time. They´re sections of my life. Like when you cut down a tree and look at the rings you can see: that ring was 50 years ago, and that ring was 75 years ago, and that ring there was just six months. Or, they´re like the strata you can see in a cliff. That song is - well, it´s not exactly nostalgic. You said semi-nostalgic, I suppose, but it´s just one of those memories that is hard to let go of. A memory you don´t really know whether it was like that at the time or whether you just remember it that way. Experiences mature in your head. That´s what you felt then, and then this is what you feel about them now. They resonate and often become quite different things. Supposedly, good wine takes 20 years to be ready to drink or something. Of course if you leave it too long it tastes horrible, it´s all gone off.

That happens to me all the time. I go to Switzerland quite often and run into people there I haven´t seen for years. You talk about events, and you find that the other person remembers them utterly differently then you do. You suddenly realise how much your memory is selective in favour of what suits you.

That´s what the Beatles found when they did the Anthology. They couldn´t even agree on what happened. They say that people die twice, don´t they. They die once when they die, and then they die again when the last person who remembers them has died. Eventually there will be no one left who remembers Virginia Woolf. There will be nobody left who understands Shakespeare, the English language that Shakespeare wrote, and that will fall to the ground. But maybe it will make a difference how people are. We live and die but our culture mutates. You can kill a culture, but it can still come back, which can be a good or bad thing. As long as there are words written in books, and pictures engraved, things will last. But now we have all these recorded mediums which unfortunately will all become obsolete. That´s why I make sure that all my old records are still pressed on vinyl. Cause vinyl is the thing that will last the longest.

Is that one of the reasons you´re writing these songs that are like the rings in a tree...

Like the grooves in a record...

...that you want to be remembered?

Oh yes, I think so. I think one of the drives behind being an artist is that you want to be remembered. Not only do you want to be remembered. But also, one of the functions of art is to tell the future that you were there, to say: look, we were there, this is how it felt. Even if it´s a distortion or an exaggeration. It´s like in the movies when someone goes into a prison cell and you see that someone else has scratched their name into the prison wall. That´s what you´re doing. You scratch your name in the wall for the next person who comes along. That´s one of the functions of being an artist. The reason why some of us have to do it. I´ve always been very aware that. I´ve always seen my market, my demographic, as the future - apart from the people who buy my records and come to my shows, which is nice, it pays me to keep doing it. But I´ve always wanted the work to be there after I went. The function was not to celebrate today, to be a pop record or a hit record, it was to send messages off into the future.

Do you find it harder as you get older to find subjects to write songs about or do they still just come to you?

The songs just appear. The man upstairs just hands me a piece of paper with the words, and I find out years later what they´re about. They´re usually some sort of message from my unconscious to do something, which I ignore at the time, and then I look back and I realise that my unconscious was right. Not always, though. The songs come from different sources. There are internal songs and external songs. There are songs where the focus is more on the outside world, and there are songs that are more about my life. Stuff just comes. I actually have no memory of writing it down. I looked at a notebook the other day. I realised these things had appeared, just as if you were a hunter and leave a trap out in the woods and then go away and come back the next day and find there´s a beast in it, or some bird. I don´t mean to be blasé. But there are times when I don´t write, and I do worry about things not coming through. But in my experience the less I worry about them, the more things come through. One thing I´´ve learned to do over the last ten years or so is just to ignore it. It takes care of itself.

I spent a week or so in Norway a couple of years ago, and I found the place almost unbearable. I couldn´t take it at all that you could still read a book under the tree at one o´clock in the morning. I would have been even more disorientated in winter when it´s always night.

Oh, yeah, well, the insomnia! I just think it´s a very soulful place. It might just be the way I felt when I was there. My introduction to Norway was just like an introduction to an extreme dark soul. We were looking at all the ferns growing out of the rocks, and the sides of the cliffs, and the cliffs would go up above you, into the mist. The hills would disappear into the mist above you and they´d go down into the fjords below you. And there was whatever was happening to me at the time. I suppose it´s a reaction that´s still going on now. I haven´t quite let it go.

But you never had a Norwegian Death Metal phase?

I didn´t have a Norwegian Death Metal phase. Although when we did play there I remember there were AC/DC fans who used to come and see us. They drink from nought to 500 very fast.

One of the things that comes up in all the stories about you is the strange contradiction, seemingly, that you´ve always had a psychedelic touch to what you were doing, and at the same time you never seemed to have had a druggy phase. But alcohol, has that aided your muse?

Alcohol has been a much bigger factor in my life than drugs. Yeah. I smoked pot as a teenager. But everybody does. Even politicians now don´t have to say that they didn´t inhale, like Clinton. I grew up listening to that music, but it was the attitude that affected me. Also, even as a kid I was looking at pictures of Bosch and Dali and Breughel and Magritte. I think little boys just like surrealist pictures. I was reading HG Wells and JG Ballard long before the psychedelic stuff appeared, which was more when I was already an adolescent. Long before I smoked any pot or took any acid that whole way of seeing was important to me. And if anything, what drugs I did take made it harder to function and to focus. On the few occasions i took acid all creativity seemed pointless. Why play the guitar or write a picture if it´s all going on out there? You can´t compete with your internal world. You don´t need a poem if you can see what´s happening inside. I think that was an assault to my ego. Do you take drugs?

No.

Did you take drugs when you were a kid?

Yes, but I didn?t have to make music whilst taking them.

Did you listen to music on drugs?

The Incredible String Band was my favourite to go with an acid trip.

Oh! I heard them on mescalin once, and I liked that. But you see, I listened to that stuff straight before I heard it stoned, and without having to take LSD I got this terrific feeling from it. I always felt that you shouldn´t need to be enhanced to listen to it. And you shouldn´t really have to be enhanced to make it. Alcohol, on the other hand, really came in because it was a kind of anaesthetic. It was a reaction to drugs. Drugs in my experience made it much harder to communicate with people. The people I was with, we all got more and more depressed when we were pot smokers, and more introverted, and worse at getting girlfriends. We couldn´t communicate with anyone, we were all self-absorbed, and just drilling down when you should be drilling up. Alcohol was a great way out of that because you were sort of friendly, and talkative and uninhibited. At least when you were drinking the morbid over-sensitivity that acid and pot could give you was got rid of. It makes you thicker skinned. The trouble is you also have a hangover in the end. Anyway, I did love the Incredible String Band!

Do you still?

Yeah. I´m touch with Robin Williamson a bit. A couple of years ago he actually rang me on Xmas day. I missed the call but I thought that was fantastic. I picked up my mobile and saw it was a call from Robin Williamson.

What i liked about them was their attitude. They didn´t put any limits on anything they did. Anything went.

It was worth trying. And then that reached its zenith - like so much - at the end of the sixties. And it kind of crawled back down. Just like a Virginia Creeper. It just goes up the wall, and then it starts to die away. And everybody died away at the same time. A new generation came up. People like David Bowie who got going in the 60s and really got going in the 70s. But the rest of them from Brian Wilson to the Beatles to Syd Barrett to Ray Davies into Dylan, Donovan, Pete Townshend - even the Stones, well the Stones just doped all their inspiration away. But you know, their best tunes were done in the 60s. Zeitgeist is the word. It was there, and then they all lost it.

What were the circumstances of recording of this album? Did you set out to do anything different compared to the previous album with the same people? Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, Bill Rieflin.

Well, there´s another album in between which hasn´t come out. This record is actually the third record we?ve made. We made one record called "Olé! Tarantula", which is the first one. Then we got together at my house in West London and made a second record in 2006 called Propeller Time. We decided to make a record in a week. It was meant to be a bit like the Basement Tapes. We had all these people like John Paul Jones, and Morris Windsor, and Nick Lowe, and Chris Ballew from the Presidents of the USA, my niece Ruby, Johnny Marr. There´s a lot of different people on it. And then we started making another one in 2007 at another short gathering in my house. Then we recorded a bit more in Seattle and in Tucson, Arizona, both times at the end of little tours. We were making two records, really, and we didn´t really know what to do with them. We even thought of making a double album. Listening to them, they both seemed good, but in the end I didn´t want to mix the two years up. 2006 seemed very different from 2007. A different hand of cards, if you like. A different mood of the songs. With this one the songs seemed to be a little bit more confident, and there seemed to be a little bit more electric music on there. So it seemed to be more similar to "Olé! Tarantula" as a follow up and we decided to work on "Goodnight Oslo". This was only last November.

I´ve never really liked making a record in one go. When I was on a major label with the Egyptians, towards the end we were doing that classic thing of going in and doing and album and mixing it and putting it out, so we had no perspective. You started, and then three months later you had a finished record. You were never away from it long enough to say"oh my god we should have turned up the vocals", or "oh what a stupid overdub!" I´ve always liked to do little bits here and there. A friend of mine, an A&R man called Howard Thompson, he was the man who discovered The Psychedelic Furs, and Motorhead, and he signed Billy Bragg, and Björk, The Sugarcubes, and Happy Mondays in the States. He´s quite a legendary guy. He retired from professional life a while ago and he runs an internet radio station called North Fork Sound. No Fo. It´s a great mixture of things. Oh, and he discovered the Screaming Blue Messiahs - when we went to Norway in 82 they were called Motor Boys Motor! When he was working for CBS Howard was never really into our stuff, but we gradually became friends over the years, and he would be ringing me up and say, erm, now that bit in the first song, is that "Like a Rolling Stone"? and I said, "yes", and he said: "why don´t you get a backing singer to sing "how does it feel"? and I went, "oh, alright!" I´d come home with two bags of shopping and the phone would ring, and Howard would go: "have you thought of putting a trumpet on that song?" I actually had much more creative input from him than I´ve ever had from an A& R person.

Your brand of Englishness has been much more popular in America than in the UK. Can you see any reason for this discrepancy?

Monty Python, to some extent. Monty Python paved the way for me. They were sort of like a modern Alice in Wonderland, an Alice in Wonderland for the psychedelic era. It was more than comedy. It was filed under comedy, but it was something else. And it also wasn´t just theatre of the absurd. Like all great things, it was defined by itself, it was Monty Python. And so I suppose I came along and I probably reminded them of that a bit. I was just referencing my own world. And there´s things that seemed inane or silly to us because we live with them, but over there they seemed exotic. I´d sing about Basingstoke and Reading because nobody else did. The tradition with road songs and travel songs is that you can sing about St. Louis and Oklahoma City and the Golden Gate and all that lot, and it sounds romantic. But if you sing - as Billy Bragg proved - about the A13, it just sounds banal. So when I recorded "I Often Dream of Trains", people went, "oh yeah, Basingstoke, Reading, very funny". But to the Americans - they didn´t think it was romantic, they´d go, "oh, Basingstoke, wow, is that like Hackensack, or Yonkers?" These branch lines, these strange places. And they´d often even reference Python, writing it up - "Robyn Hitchcock, claustrophobic small-town English world". They were happy to imagine it. And I think it was easier for the Americans. To the British it was too close to home to enjoy it at the time. They seem to be happy with it now. It just takes a while to adjust to things.