I’ve just returned from Russia where I was invited to play a couple of shows as part of the excellent Muzenergo Festival. It’s been a long time since I played any of my own music and it was something of a surprise to me how well it went down. I’ve always been quite selfish and insular in writing and performing, not really taking into account that what I do might be experienced, let alone appreciated, by others – so I was really touched by the response. I was also impressed by how passionate the organisers, and everyone I met there, were about discovering and supporting new music. In a country where Amazon and iTunes have not yet utterly saturated consumers’ consciousness, there is a different kind of inquisitive spirit. The whole thing inspired me to write 3 songs at the airport on the way home, and strengthened my resolve to do much more to promote my next record which comes out in February. Then today it was straight back into the ‘day job’, doing strings for the Sugababes, trying to make one violinist (albeit a brilliant one) sound like an orchestra. Credit crunch affecting the budgets even of top pop stars apparently.

By contrast, an air of freedom, relaxation and luxury pervaded at Bryn Derwen studios in idyllic Snowdonia, for the recording of Kathryn Williams’ album. It was just a magical experience – we did the whole record in 3 days, almost entirely live. Kate St John had assembled a brilliant team of people, including Martyn Barker on percussion (who plays on my new album) and Neil Macoll, who is easily the finest acoustic guitarist I have ever worked with and has loads of other sounds at his disposal too. Working with him was a particular joy. The engineer David Wrench achieved the near-impossible combination of fantastic sound with minimal fuss, and even revealed a rare talent for reading the shipping forecast in a strangely sexy way (‘Tyne Dogger, rough or very rough’).

The shipping forecast turned out to contain pertinent information for me, as I had to sail from Wales over to Dublin to do a concert with Gavin Bryars. He is a true living legend of a composer, and it was a privilege that he had included parts for me in a new song cycle conceived for Iarla O’Lionaird. Although I’ve spent a good deal of time standing in front of classical string players, it is so different to be part of the ensemble, to feel how unfamiliar and nuanced the flow and movement of these groups is, and to recognise how much more focused your concentration has to be. Having come from a situation of complete freedom the day before, it was actually pretty scary to be plunged into one where utter precision is called for, and on the first day I felt I was in way over my head and got very depressed. It came together (more or less) for the performance, and while I wasn’t satisfied by my level of accuracy, I did at least manage to do what I’ve wanted to try for a long time – integrating electric guitar textures with acoustic instruments in a sypmpathetic way, without sacrificing the integrity of the sound. I think this is something that would be impossible without playing through a laptop; whenever guitar amps are involved I find the sound too directional, and either raucous or castrated. Hopefully we’ll play the piece again and i’ll get a chance to do everything really properly.

I spent a few days with a couple of new artists – a guy called Joe on Rough Trade who seems to have somehow channelled the spirit of Ella Fitzgerald into his 17-year-old larynx, and Liam Gerner who has a lovely line in thought-provoking but gutsy acoustic rock. It’s a nice feeling to go in and try and help people by being, essentially, a fresh pair of ears. And I managed to crowbar the hurdy-gurdy in at one point which is always satisfying. I also finished a set of mixes for the Eno/Herbie Hancock project. It’s still not quite fully formed, but it’s getting closer. I hope. Brian and I are both extremely excited about it – there is something truly ‘new’ about it. I realised that today it has been underway for almost exactly 2 years – the first sessions were in November 2006, then Brian handed me the files to start sorting out this time last year, and it’s been intermittently honed ever since.

And finally, some more film work this month. I finished mixing and tweaking the score I wrote with David Holmes for ‘5 Minutes Of Heaven’, did some work with Jon Hopkins on a possible Warp Films project, and had a few guitar sessions with Alex Heffes for the new Russell Crowe film ‘State Of Play’. Random Russell Crowe fact: I once encountered him backstage in Santa Monica at a Neil Finn concert when I was doing the support slot with Ed Harcourt. We were watching from the wings when Russell wandered up to do the same. He didn’t acknowledge us but he did do one of the most dreadful farts it has ever been my misfortune to be in the vicinity of, which resulted in our immediate departure. Perhaps that was his tactic.

I’m sitting in Belfast airport, having spent a couple of days finishing a film score with David Holmes. Luckily most of the stuff we wrote last time round ended up getting used, so now it’s just a case of tailoring each piece to fit the scenes. We had a bit of time left over today so we started work on a new track for my next album, based on some samples from David’s incredible collection of obscure vinyl. It’s a new way of writing for me and it has inspired me to write lyrics, which is just what I need.

All of last month was spent doing another film score, with Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins. I haven’t yet seen Brian’s involvement with the film mentioned anywhere like iMDB, so I can’t really say what it is. But I can say that one of the highlights was discovering that Brian is an uncannily good whistler. He stunned the rest of us into silence by first composing a beautifully acrobatic and complex melody, then whistling it faultlessly. He put it down to his ‘postman gene’ (the profession runs in his family). We had a lot of fun doing what could easily have become a really pressured job. It was a good mixture of improvising, editing and classical orchestration and there got to be quite a production line going at times, with Brian emailing new pieces through, Jon working away in his studio, me with a string quartet in the basement, and Peter Chilvers liaising with the music editors. Again, frustratingly, I can’t say too much more about the working method here. But, in contrast to working with David, we hardly looked at the film at all while we were working, and that seemed to lead to some happy accidents when the music was eventually put to picture.

More film stuff – I had another guitar session with Dario Marianelli, who did the score to ‘Atonement’. I nervously asked if I could have a look at his Oscar as I’d never seen one before, and he let me pick it up. It was ridiculously heavy. He ostensibly has a very ‘classical’ approach to film composition, but he also uses uncontrolled elements brilliantly. He got me to play a sequence of very neutral patterns, and I couldn’t see where it was going, but he then combined them and added them to other elements he had (which I’d not been shown), and the result was magical with the picture.

I also had a session for a film called ‘Nutcracker’ – a big-budget, CGI musical version of Tchaikovsky. When I got booked, they told me it would be ‘just a bit of rhythm guitar’. But I arrived to find a couple of top-class, but decidedly tense-looking session players, and an extremely complex ream of music on my stand. I’d had a few drinks the night before and the whole situation began to resemble a bad dream – there were tempo changes, strange rhythms, unpredictable click tracks blaring through the headphones, and the guitar had to be tuned weirdly so none of the notes on the page fell on the instrument where they usually do. The composer was Eduard Artemyev, a legendary figure in Russia from the Soviet era. He is a wonderful man, and knows exactly how to write the kind of film music that makes you feel really excited. Luckily I know a bit of Russian so when I fouled up an entry, I managed to splutter ‘Sorry, I’m not ready yet’ in Russian and it went down quite well. I went back for an overdub session a couple of weeks later and it was a lot easier. They had recorded the orchestra by then, and it was mind-blowing playing over the top of that. Definitely one of those ‘I love my job’ moments.

David Coulter of musical saw fame kindly asked me to work on the soundtrack to a theatre piece with him. Working together had been long overdue and I learnt a lot from him. He plays a great number of instruments and approaches them in an intriguingly merciless way, treating them unsentimentally, like tools. He has this great physicality about him – making music out of found objects, and just his mouth and hands, which takes a lot of balls to do successfully.

My dear friend Imogen Heap invited me over to play on her new record. Some of the session was filmed and can be seen on her video blog. She was the first person I worked with (when we were both 19) and she’s partly responsible for the ‘sound design’ aspect of what I do. There was very little guitar in her music then so I ended up trying to impersonate various other things, and she used to say ‘can you make the guitar sound like an elephant’ and stuff like that. She’s also the kind of producer who can take what you play and change it beyond all recognition, but this time I think it might stay like it is.

I did some recording with Magnus Fiennes, for the tv series ‘Hustle’. It’s quite influenced by the ‘Oceans’ films, so I brought all the gear I used on Oceans 12, including a fuzz pedal that in LA eventually resolved an intense 2-day struggle to find the right distortion sound. By midnight everyone in the studio was rocking out and half-drunk, and the session only ended when Mag unfortunately spilt a glass of wine into his laptop.

A bit more writing with Beth Rowley and a gig with Iarla O’Lionaird where the support act was a man who climbed into a giant balloon, and that’s about it for this instalment. I just went to the airport bar and ordered a large glass of red. The guy behind the bar said ‘I wouldn’t like to pay that price for a drink so I’ll just charge you for a small’. Only in Ireland would that happen – I love it!

This month I’ve been working on the new Eno/Byrne record, which is now on the way to being mixed. Brian handed me all the files and I started off by collating all the different versions that had sprouted up; he and David had been working separately on different versions of the same song. Once the right version was agreed, Seb Rochford came down to my studio to put drums on everything. As with every time I work with him, he completely blew me away. Particularly remarkable is the way he tunes his kit to each track. All drummers are supposed to do this, but he gets it so right that his drums always sit inside the track perfectly, which was particularly important on this record as there were so many crazy loops and bits of percussion already on it. Brian came to the studio for a couple of hours and, after generally approving things, made a number of brilliant rapid-fire suggestions that completely changed the feel of some of the tracks. We went to the local pie-n-mash place (G. Kelly’s – an East End legend – slightly surreal seeing him in there) and got drenched on the way.

The next stage was editing all the drums to sit properly with the programmed bits, which took the best part of a week. Then I started going through all the sounds doing the same to them. Since then I’ve been playing extra bits of guitar, piano and percussion, and emailing back and forth with Brian and David, putting in all the last bits that need to be added. David is incredibly fast delivering his vocal takes (which he’s been emailing from New York), and it’s a real pleasure to go sifting through them – he’s such an eccentric singer and the gaps between verses are often filled with joyful little ‘whoop’s and interjections, and sometimes the unmistakable honks of a New York taxi, which magically always seem to end just in time for when the singing starts. Bizarrely I’ve only actually met him once, when he came to London a couple of weeks ago. We got to have a guitar jam together on one of the tracks, and the same day I helped Brian layer up his trademark choir of manly vocals. It’s always lovely witnessing him do that, and especially so underneath David’s voice – the two together is such a familiar, classic combination. So now I’m preparing all the files for mixing, which is fairly grunt-like but I definitely feel like a privileged grunt.

I did a couple of concerts this month called Daughters Of Albion, which is like a mini-festival of female folk singers featuring Norma Waterson, Kathryn Williams, June Tabor and several others. I was filling in for David Coulter, and if ever there was a terrifying person to have to fill in for, it is he – he plays everything from the mandola to the musical saw. So I came duly armed with hurdy-gurdy, mandolin, bouzouki, guitaret, bandura and guitorgan, and had a great time making strange sounds and playing beautiful folk music. It all felt very relaxed (especially considering it was put together so quickly), and a few times during the concert I was lost in the music and completely forgot I was doing a gig.

I also did a show of my own in Brighton, the first for nearly a year. I decided to minimise the looping trickery and do most of it on acoustic, and it was a much more pleasurable, musical experience. I’m planning to do a lot more shows around the time of my next record. And last night I played with Peter Schwalm and a video artist called Sophie Clements. My part was completely improvised but I took all my cues from the visuals; it was a new thing for me responding to sound and vision at the same time, and it seemed to take a lot of the potential bullshit out of improvisation – the sounds have to compliment what you see and the notes compliment what you hear, and the music seems to flow out really naturally.

Lastly I did a bit of work with Jon Hopkins on the film we are doing with Brian, and had a few days in the studio with Claire Nicolson, putting guitars and strings on her album and producing a couple of tracks that I wrote with her. It was a bit of a rush job but turned out well – mostly thanks to the drummer, Phil Wilkinson, who creates wonderful atmospheres with the simplest patterns, and who hits an empty suitcase with a brush instead of using a kick drum.

The ‘roast up the Matterhorn’ referred to last month went ok in the end, although after a 36 hour journey it was somewhat frustrating to have to travel the last leg in a tiny electric-powered wagon (the town of Zermatt does not allow cars). I was looking forward to going up the mountain, but the only day we had time to do it, the whole mountain was closed due to adverse weather conditions (fog). Incidentally, Zermatt has 2 graveyards – one for the locals and one for tourists…

In musicians’ parlance, a ‘roast’ refers to a particularly challenging gig. I am currently stuck in snowy Gatwick awaiting a plane to the Matterhorn, on the way to a prog-rock roast presided over by the impossibly affable Jon Lord (of Deep Purple fame). When I received the sheet music a day before the rehearsal, and saw page after page densely blackened with semiquavers, I panicked slightly and started to think of ways to escape. But then I cast my mind back to my college days when I used to be able to play that sort of thing, and decided to ‘get my chops back’. It’s been a stimulating experience.

Most of the last month has been spent in my studio, working on a number of projects. I produced a song for Beth Rowley which will feature on a forthcoming Dusty Springfield compilation, recorded for a My Robot Friend track, did 4 new Smoke Fairies songs, continued work on the Brian Eno/David Byrne project, and had a great couple of days with drummer Seb Rochford, starting new tracks for my next record. It’s being overseen by David Holmes; he always seems to get the best out of me when we work on other projects, so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when we do something of mine. I’m trying not to write or plan too much in advance, and letting the tracks evolve instead, avoiding my usual sounds and tendencies.

Also this month I was asked to contribute a track to an album put together by Rosetta Life – a charity that uses the arts to enhance the lives of terminally ill children. They gave me a 15 minute cd of a 5 year old girl called Kimberley, who at birth was given just weeks to live. She is unable to speak, but can sing and imitate sounds. So music is the way she communicates. I made an electronic track using only sounds that she had produced, and overlaid a commentary by her mother explaining her condition. As with the previous thing I did for this charity, it seemed like a blessed project in a way – there were so many happy accidents, and unlikely alignments of disparate elements turning out to be in time, or in the same key. It was a joy to work on.

A friend in LA is producing an album called ‘Headless Heroes’, featuring a lovely new American folk artist called Alela Diane covering obscure 60s songs. He asked me to do string arrangements for 3 of them, and it was great to be able to record them all at home and send the files by email. I’ve been so enjoying working at home and having these wonderful projects come to me. It’s the kind of life I want at the moment (especially now that I am at Gatwick in a 5-hour delay).

A couple of forays into adland, one successful and one not. I just deleted the paragraph I wrote about the experience, but if you can imagine a situation where bullshit also has the capacity to break your heart (though at no fault of the people you are working for I hasten to add), then you’ll get the jist. I have a lot of respect for people who spend their whole careers doing that kind of thing. Even when it goes well, it’s decimating.

A session for Jon Hopkins’ new album and a few tweaks to the closing credits of the Hunger soundtrack, and that’s pretty much it. Spare moments were spent thinking about with lyrical approaches to my next solo project. I think I want to sing this time and, whereas I’ve often written for others (and 10 years ago used to write and sing my own songs), I have a pathological aversion to most of the lyrics I hear and write. But I’m finding another way to approach things, partly inspired by The Books. I’ve also really enjoyed singing again, and ended up adding backing vocals to the Beth Rowley and Headless Heroes tracks. Like the unexpected prog roast, it’s a new challenge and I’m going to take it slow and steady.

I’ve just finished working with David Holmes on the soundtrack to a film called “Hunger”. It follows the last weeks in the life of the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands, and is one of the most intense and uncompromising pieces of cinema I have ever seen. When we first watched it David and I looked at each other and said, ‘It doesn’t need any music’! But the director, visual artist Steve McQueen, fell in love with the sound of the hurdy-gurdy through a guitar amp, so the soundtrack has ended up being mainly these pure, minimalist, ‘unmusical’ tones. It’s my first proper credit as a film composer, and a pretty incredible one to start with. There was more film work earlier in the month when I got hired by Dario Marianelli (he just won the Oscar for ‘Atonement’) to provide some psychadelic guitar sounds for a new film called ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’. It was an interesting session because he hadn’t composed the music yet – what he wanted from me was a selection of ‘building blocks’ which he could work with. So although getting the textures was straight-forward, I had to make them as harmonically neutral as possible, so as not to suggest a composition. I also had to play lots of fingerpicky acoustic for him to chop up, but without any regualr accents – which was surprisingly difficult.

I did a couple of sessions at Bryan Ferry’s studio, working on some new material for I-know-not-what-exactly. There were lots of chaotic but promising bits on various tapes and I was helping sort them out and get them into shape. Again I found Bryan tremendous fun to be with in the studio. He flits in and out of the room a lot, which means he is a constant source of fresh perspective, but when he is particular about something you have his undivided attention until it is correct. I had him dancing around the studio a few times and that felt very good indeed. There was an interesting couple of hours working on a remix of ‘Casanova’; I got to hear the original vocals with the music stripped away, and bloody hell they’re good. Such an idiosyncratic and detailed delivery.

A few other bits – finishing off editing drums for the Eno/Hancock record; we’ve sentsome bits to Herbie and are awaiting his reactions. I did a day’s writing with Claire Nicolson, a singer I’ve known for a long time and who has just acquired funding for an album. A few tweaks to the American advert that is using my track ‘Spider’. And a few hours with Katie Melua, who was absolutely delightful and sweet even after selling 8 million albums, and who is looking to shake up her sound a bit next time.

Terrifying ordeal of the month was being asked to play as part of an iTunes Live event with kt Tunstall, Billy Bragg and Foy Vance. iTunes have been unbelievably supportive of me, and of course it was an unexpected honour to be in such exalted company – which made me all the more nervous. I am a bit out of practise playing my own stuff. Also there was precisely no time to rehearse the collaborations between Foy, kt and I. But kt was an absolute force of nature, marshalling her backing singers and drummer to help out, and Foy was magic. It’s amazing though, how I can be on stage in front of literally millions of people (like at the Diana concert), and feel no nerves whatsoever because I can see the back of a famous person’s head between me and the crowd, but move me to the front of the stage and I feel like I did the night before my A-levels.

Incidentally, I did an interview with the Daily Star recently (very nice and well-informed chap who rang me), but on reading it, when asked about Brian Eno I go on about what a great guy he is and gloss over his musical achievements. A similar thing has happened in other interviews. The reason for my doing this is, everyone already knows the guy is an absolute genius! But in case anybody misinterprets my silence as some kind of slight, here it is: I can’t even begin to say how much I love and respect his music, how much it continues to influence me, and what a lucky bugger I am to get to work with him and hang out. Right, I think I feel better now that I’ve assuaged my paranoia.