This month started out with a visit from Bingo Gazingo, the octogenarian New York street poet who I’m doing a track with but had never actually met before. The man is a tornado of charm, ambition and filth. He is obsessed with having a hit single, more driven than most artists in their twenties, and I’m going to do my best for him. He was in town to perform with the brilliant My Robot Friend, and watching him shuffle through the crowd afterwards, being mobbed by beautiful women was just completely heart–warming. Google him!

Then I went to Croatia to do a show with Bryan Ferry. The guy who had booked him (at vast expense no doubt) was a foul, flabbily decrepit, frog–like underworld figure who, during the course of dinner, fondled the backing singers, claimed Bryan’s shy Polish assistant for his son and, aggravated by the amount of time Bryan and I spent chatting, told the sartorial legend ’You talk to HIM in London, you talk to ME now!’

I had a few gigs of my own, the best of which was with an organisation called the Recycle Collective, run by a looping bass player called Steve Lawson and featuring the singer Cleveland Watkiss, both of whom do astonishing things. It was part–planned, part–improvised and made me want to do a lot more of that free kind of playing, which I’ve neglected recently. There’s nothing like the feeling of synergy with other musicians when you’re creating something new together. Then again, there’s nothing like that cringeing feeling of hopelessness when you realize ’this is just rubbish, I wonder if I’m the only one who thinks that, and how can we end it quickly’ but that’s the challenge.

There have been a few sessions too, including one with Brian Eno for a project based on the Biblical plagues. We were working on ’flies’, which included hilarious buzzing mouth noises from Robert Wyatt and ridiculously OTT soloing from me. I’m meant to be doing a track for a very cool US label, but it has to be a certain kind of thing and I just can’t get past the ’I’ve done this before and it was better than this crap’ stage. Time is running out and I’m hoping that will inspire me.

Lo and behold, the drought is over. Last week I had an incredible 4 days recording sea shanties for a project devised by Jonny Depp and produced by Hal Wilner. Many different singers contributed, from Nick Cave (brooding and witty) to Bryan Ferry (indescribably cool, even when singing about fish), via folk legends the Carthys and Linda Thompson, and my old mucker Ed Harcourt. But the highlight had to be the artist Ralph Steadman, who led a spirited rendition of ’Little Boy Billee’. There was loads of chorus singing in all the shanties, with everyone crammed into in the tiny vocal booth. I was part of the 6–piece ’house band’, which included Warren Ellis from the Bad Seeds on violin who was extremely inspiring to play with. Hal is the most slyly patient producer I have ever encountered. He gives the musicians so much space to find their own way into the song (most producers are determined to stamp their vision on things straight away). He’ll then make just one or two tiny suggestions, which are always dead on, and that’s it. I can’t really emphasise enough how rare that approach is, and how much fun it was to just sit in a studio with all these people and play live instead of fiddling around with overdubs.The album should be out in May.

Before that I’d been in Belfast working on the soundtrack to a short film with David Holmes, during which he also completed a remix for my next record. In fact, the soundtrack turned out to be comprised mainly of music discarded from the initial Good German soundtrack sessions, when it still looked like the film called for an electronic score. So the pressure was off and there was a lot of messing around.

On the solo front I’ve had a couple of gigs which might have suffered a bit from my not having done any practise for a couple of months. Perhaps not too obvious to the untrained eye, but it makes the difference between playing from the heart and freaking out about which pedal to hit next. I also put the finishing touches to the record I made with J Peter Schwalm which is kind of a Christmassy ambient thing, and had a meeting about it with a PR company who seem to think they can do the business, which is exciting.

I also did a couple of ’sessions’ for a ballet class. This involved sitting at the front of a room full of dancers who were being led through impossibly complicated moves by their teacher, who would suddenly turn to me and say something like ’8, 8, 16, 12. In threes’ and I would have to improvise a piece conforming to those subdivisions. It was very challenging, and I felt as nervous as I do before going onstage. But it’s lovely to respond to the dancers, and I think they enjoyed the novelty of electric guitar loops instead of what they are used to – a bongo.