It’s been a wonderful week. First came a concert supporting my friend Imogen Heap at Bush Hall. Hers was the first proper band I was in 8 years ago. We had a grand old time back then touring the shitholes of England during which, in many ways, she helped lay the foundations for my style (such as it is) by twisting my Classical brain with instructions like “make your guitar sound like an elephant”. It’s great to see her doing so well, and her audience was incredibly attentive and responsive to my set.

Then it was off to Ireland for a concert with Iarla O’Lionaird, the country’s foremost “sean nos” singer. The term means “old style”, but he likes to use electronic and ambient sounds too. The band was myself on laptop guitar and a great pianist called Graham Henderson. We spent a lovely 2 days at Iarla’s home in the countryside, playing with his children and doing a bit of rehearsing too. I had been a bit nervous, as I inherited the gig from Steve Jones (see below), an extremely original and talented player. But it turned into one of the happiest musical experiences of my life, mainly due to the sheer depth of feeling in Iarla’s voice. He’s a charming, frenetic, kind character and this beautiful voice just flies out of him. It is such an effortless, rich, benevolent sound. Sentimental but not cloying, passionate but unforced. The chord structures, rambling freely around the contours of long melodies, were new to me. Interestingly, at the concert in Cork I could sense a certain amount of uneasiness in the audience over the mixture of traditional and modern elements; there is a purism there which is slightly stuffy, and which would not be present outside of that environment. I can’t wait to play with him again.

The week ended with a concert in aid of the Stop The War Coalition. Brian Eno helped put it together and he asked me to join him, playing with Nitin Sawhney and Rachid Taha. Much of this took the form of me playing through Brian’s chain of Kaoss pads, which feels like being sonically mangled by a robot dj. Nitin is an extremely impressive musician. At the (brief) rehearsal he demonstrated alarming proficiency on guitar, piano, and electronic and vocal percussion. For such a disciplined talent he was remarkably open to ideas and his set ended up consisting mainly of semi-structured improvisations. In some ways it sounded similar to Brian’s band that I was in a few years ago. Brian has a very gentle but persuasive and potent way about him, and his musical personality shapes anything he is involved in, without his having to actually play that much. Rachid’s set was a blast. A French-Algerian protest singer of a sort, his pained voice exalts in defiance and struggle. During the soundcheck, standing next to Brian, I felt a little like Mini-Me or something (I’d felt this before doing a similar thing with Brian for Grace Jones), but the band were very welcoming and during the gig itself I felt more a part of it. The unrehearsed factor led to my accidentally leaving the stage in the middle of a song, when I misconstrued a break-down as an ending! But the most surreal moment of the evening came when Mick Jones of The Clash, guesting with Rachid on a cover of “Rock The Casbah”, asked me what key it was in.

What I really took away from this week has been the sheer depth and meaning in the voices of these artists, which comes in large part from some kind of folk tradition. It seems to me that there is an honesty, and therefore emotional authority in evidence, which makes a lot of the fake attitudes and affected voices sometimes present in more popular forms look supremely shallow and silly. Even though I’m lucky enough always to work with musicians I love, I’ve been shaken up this week and it feels good.

Oh, one more thing. An album I produced by Breadfoot featuring Anna Phoebe, is now available from www.breadfoot.com. It’s flatpicking guitar and banjo duets, and is very lovely.

I’ve just got back from a gig with Petra in Oslo supporting the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and doing the Norwegian equivalent of Jools Holland, a show that translates as Big Studio (”it sounds better in Norwegian,” our manager told us sheepishly), hosted by a charmingly camp little troll. The highlight of the trip though was watching the duck equivalent of white water rafting on the surprisingly rapid river that runs through the city.

A couple of weeks back I did an “audition” for EMI with a lovely singer called Jo Harrop who I wrote some songs for last year. Terrifyingly, they are looking for something like the new Carpenters. The audition consisted of playing to one of the execs in an empty boardroom, being filmed for later perusal by the bigwigs. Actually it was ok. My worst audition experience was for the unspeakable Jonathan Wilkes (it was a long time ago and I needed the money, ok). 7 guitarists were herded into a rehearsal room and ordered to mime guitar and vocals to a track we had never heard before, while an ignorant gum-chewing Tina and the great man assessed our assets. Where is he now, eh? Oh yeah… in panto.

Phew. Work on my new record is proceeding apace. Brian Eno has made another incredible vocal contribution, as have Foy Vance, Bingo Gazingo and James Wolff (see below). I’ve also added cello and bassoon. It is new to me to be working with so many people on my own music, and a great joy varying from the interpretive skills of the classical players to the intuition of the singers. It can be awkward sitting opposite someone knowing that the two of you have to make a song appear, but when it happens it’s a wonderful thing.

Lastly, I was asked to put a track together by Rosetta Life, the charity behind the Great Ormond Street, Notting Hill and South Africa children’s internet jam that I was involved with a few months ago (see below). I was given a stack of cds of all the children’s performances. What was supposed to be a transcontinental jam ended up as nothing of the sort because of technological breakdowns (thank you Microsoft) so I was left wondering how on earth to put together a song involving so many elements that had been created in blind isolation. But by some absolute miracle, completely unplanned, much of the South African singing was in the same key and tempo as the English children’s instruments. The result is both life-affirming and incredibly moving. To learn more about the work of this wonderful charity go to www.rosettalife.org