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!

I have just emerged from the unforgettable mammoth voyage that was Hal Wilner’s Rogues Gallery Live. 3 concerts, 60 sea shanties, and more performers than you could shake a cutlas at. At one point Lou Reed, Tim Robbins, Shane MacGowan, the Carthy Family, Neil Hannon, Gavin Friday, Chris Difford and many more were all onstage, and I thought I had to be dreaming. Too many highlights to list really, but playing hurdy-gurdy with Lou Reed is worth a mention. At rehearsal he prowled onto the stage, and told the band: “I do not want to have to follow you at all. You will follow me. I will change the chords and the timing without warning and you need to keep up. If that sounds like fun, then play. If that doesn’t sound like fun, don’t play anything“. It sounded like fun, and we did play, and he seemed to like it. Random observations I made: he has a pair of glasses whose lenses flip up and down and he likes to play with them a lot; he has unexpectedly soft hands and is very courteous and gentle under a gnarled exterior; he has a phenomenal sense of tempo, disregarding the ubiquitous metronome in search of the ’sweet spot’; he really likes hurdy-gurdy. The house band included David Coulter on (literally) show-stopping saw, Roger Eno on piano, euphonium and naughty crosswords, Andy Newmark (from Bryan Ferry’s band) on drums, Martyn Barker (who plays on my next record) on percussion, Dudley Phillips on bass and Kate St John on accordion. at the Dublin show all the artists crowded in at the back of the stage just behind my amp to watch the show, and the atmosphere was amazing. It was truly a privilege to be there.

Earlier in the month I went to Belfast to work on a film score with David Holmes. The director is Oliver Hirschbiegel who did ‘Downfall’. It is mostly bass and laptop guitar textures. I took the files away to mix at home, and we’ll get together again in a few weeks to do the remaining cues. I also had a session with Annie Lennox. Before she arrived the band set up and got an arrangement going, and it sounded good, if a bit ’session musician-y’. Then she walked in and quietly but firmly changed the direction of the whole thing, explaining her ideas gently then pounding the shit out of an upright piano to demonstrate. It was brilliant to be playing with that unmistakable voice coming through the headphones. A weird guitar solo was called for, and again she directed things very eloquently; a couple of times I messed up at the end and swore, which made me feel guilty.

I did some more recording with Beth Rowley, and her drummer Phil Wilkinson, who adds strange bits of junk to his drumkit to devastating effect. She asked me to do a couple of gigs with her to fill in for her regular guitarist, so I had to learn the set on the morning of the first show. Then I found out the show was televised and it was a bit nerve-wracking. I can’t help it, no matter how many times I do tv it always makes me nervous. Even in the days when I did terrible miming jobs which didn’t involve actual playing, I used to worry about falling over instead. The other gig was at T In The Park which turned into a bit of a reunion as lots of old friends were there playing with other bands. Then I went to a session with a great film composer called Alex Heffes. He is making a record of improvisations with various people all over the world, from Uganda to New York. He wanted some sounds from me to tie certain elements together without compromising the purity of the interactions, so it was an interesting exercise – I had to be very discreet, but still contribute something tangible. I ended up on tracks featuring Ryuichi Sakamoto and Regina Spektor.

The artwork to my next record The Grape And The Grain is nearly ready, although I don’t think it will be out until after Christmas now. I’ve been writing again, and I got a brilliant new Swart amp which has been inspiring me. I have a lot of ideas floating around at the moment which have been driving me a bit mad, so I’m just trying to get them all down roughly so that they can be experienced in reality instead of in my head. Inevitably, some of them come out and I wonder why I devoted so much time mulling them over when in fact they’re a bit crap, but there are plenty that I want to keep working on. David Lynch talks about “staying true to the idea” – meaning that at every single stage you need to cling fiercely to the essence and feeling of the initial inspiration. It sounds obvious, but it’s really difficult not to let certain things slide – you might compromise just slightly on the feeling of a guitar sound for instance, and it might seem that it doesn’t matter, but it can actually fatally skew the integrity of the whole thing. In other words, I’ve had to do a lot of twiddling and tweaking before I can actually sit down and play.

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…

I am on a plane to Australia. Probably should be trying to sleep, but being unwilling to medicate myself into inertia with free booze I’m doing this instead. It is the last leg of the Bryan Ferry tour; last week we were in Russia and Eastern Europe (fact: Vilnius in Lithuania is the only town in the world with a statue of Frank Zappa). I contracted some kind of weird muscular flu in my arms and legs, which meant I could hardly manage pull my shoes on let alone play the guitar – which made the gigs a bit of a struggle. It also put a crimp in the sightseeing, so I spent most of the days productively, editing stuff for Brian Eno. He did some jams last year with a group made up of Herbie Hancock, Squarepusher, Jon Hopkins and Steve Jones. The tracks are all over 30 minutes long and, though featuring many moments of demented genius, consist mostly of highly confusing (though terrifyingly proficient) arsing about. My job was to get them down to 6 or 7 minutes each, in order to send back to Brian and Herbie for further development. Instead of trying to make remixes with my stamp on, I wanted to keep the spirit of what was happening in the room – imagining how it would have been if everyone could read each other’s minds (or even just hear each other properly – according to Brian it was difficult on the day). There is a lot of humour in it, I’ve taken out much of the noodling, and I’ve never heard music quite like it before. God knows when or how the project will be finished, but I’m continuing to work on it.

I’ve been with Brian for the last 3 days working on the music for a film. He, Jon and I sat round in his studio improvising, and it was one of the loveliest sessions I have been involved with. I used to improvise with Jon back at school and we seem to have a real affinity. He is an extraordinary player who seems able to conjure actual colours out of his keyboard when he plays. Brian is a constant source of completely unexpected ideas – sometimes beautiful, sometimes violent, sometimes funny. The ‘pieces’ morphed from atmospheres into seemingly fully-realised compositions. We had a loosely enforced ‘3 minute rule’, where instead of meandering on, after 3 minutes something had to change. On the last day Brian tried a different approach, guiding us with chords he had written on a huge board and pointing to different ones in turn, composing as he went along. It was fascinating, moving and as always with Brian, simply great fun.

I recorded with a new artist called Florence (project name: Florence And The Machine). It is like a cross between Amy Winehouse and the White Stripes, in the best possible way. Produced by Steve and Ross who I met playing in Jarvis Cocker’s band, the sessions were a scream, mainly because of the wonderfully eccentric Florence herself. She brought with her a large tom-tom (which she claimed to have been practising for 2 weeks) and used it noisily and systematically to punctuate every line not only of what she sang, but also of what she said, for most of the two days. The recording method was refreshingly old-fashioned, with the 4 of us sitting in a large room and doing everything live. The sound was absolutely brutal. After playing back one of the songs to her manager (which ends with a wall of guitar mayhem), Florence pointed triumphantly at me and said “Can you believe all that noise came out of a nice young man like that?!”

Perhaps the highlight of the month though, and one of the highlights of my career really, was a concert at the Barbican called ‘Plague Songs”. Organised by David Coulter, it was a night of songs inspired by the Biblical plagues performed by a huge cast of artists including Rufus Wainwright, Patrick Wolf, Imogen Heap, King Creosote, Damon Albarn, Sandy Dillon, Roger Eno and The Handsome Family. I was in the house band, which was made up of some truly legendary musicians, many of whom I grew up listening to on my favourite Tom Waits records. A bizarre assortment of instruments littered the stage – musical saw (David is the world’s greatest saw player), alto flute, ondes martinot and crystal bachet among many others. We only had 2 days to get a 2-hour show together, but it was a breeze. The exception being Damon’s piece, which was rather tricky timing-wise. When all attempts at explaining it failed, he turned to me and said “You’re just going to have to follow me like a whore basically”. Too many highlights to mention; apparently there might be more concerts on the cards and I do hope so – it was amazing to be involved.

So… back to the 17-hour flight, perhaps a glass of red after all, and Die Hard 4.

This month I was lucky enough to be in the house band for Hal Willner’s Jarvis Cocker Meltdown festival. The 3–hour show consisted of Disney classics reinterpreted by a host of guest singers. As is often the case with Hal, it was a hugely ambitious undertaking and brilliantly chaotic. There were only two days to rehearse. I turned up on the first feeling slightly nervous and set about trying to tune my hurdy–gurdy quietly, which is impossible. Then it was straight in at the deep end, with sheets of music flying at me in quick succession from each of the three arrangers who were putting the whole thing together. Their diverse characters ranged from New York firebrand jazz legend to gentle Tokyo classicist. As the second day drew to a close I was happy because I was getting to play loads of accordion, hurdy and guitaret, and we had managed to get through most of the set. Only one problem – so far hardly any of the singers had bothered to show up. Then with half an hour to go Grace Jones, Shane MacGowan, Pete Doherty and Kate Moss all walked in. We cancelled our taxis. Pete Doherty ran through his song then came over and said he liked my guitar. I handed it to him and he started playing a beautiful, much more effective version of the song we’d been doing, which Hal heard and told him to do at the concert. The next day, at the RFH, charts were still being handed out and music being rehearsed an hour after doors were supposed to have opened. As time ticked on Grace announced that she wanted a special riser brought on. As she prevaricated and time ticked away, I looked over at Hal. He was rubbing his hands together and smiling. As for the concert itself, there are too many highlights to mention really. It was enough of a thrill to be playing with such great musicians and a proper orchestra. But piling through “An Actor’s Life For Me” with Nick Cave was pretty memorable. Now and then in the unwanted gaps between songs one of the arrangers would come over to me and whisper urgently, “play something!” so I had the brief honour of improvising hurdy–gurdy to a packed RFH. Another time I found myself duetting on accordion with David Coulter’s musical saw. I kept expecting someone else to come in but nobody did. It was an incredible evening and I learnt a lot from Hal’s method of creating magic, which seems to be assembling a load of talented people for an unlikely cause, lighting the blue touch paper and retreating.

One of the performers that night, Baba Maal, invited me to play on his album the next day. When he had come in to rehearse, he initially found it hard to lock in with the quite rigid confines of the arrangement. I got to know exactly how he felt when I walked into his studio and found his band in the kitchen playing music that I loved but had no idea how to fit in with. In the end John Leckie the producer was looking for an entirely different flavour for the song, and the evening turned into quite a normal overdub session. I was also briefly in the studio with Ed Harcourt, working on some bonus tracks for his upcoming best–of. The tunes, as ever, were beautiful and we’ve known each other so long the parts were down in no time. A few great Ed moments too – when he walked in he hurriedly unpacked all his latest musical toys, and finished off by triumphantly producing a giant Indian headdress, saying earnestly “I thought we might need it”. He also insisted on speaking to me between takes through a vintage mic and amplifier with reverb, at huge volume, hiding underneath the mixing desk. The fabulous–sounding 60s American amp I brought along electrocuted me, the producer, his assistant and the technician. Lastly on the studio front there were an other few days in Belfast with David Holmes, doing the last few tracks for his long–awaited album. This time I brought Jon Hopkins with me, who brings an elegant magic to everything he touches.

A couple of festivals this month. Firstly the Isle of Wight, where I played alone on a little bandstand. I was glad to be there and had a great time camping, but the gig rather made me want to never do anything like it ever again. Then Glastonbury where I played with Ed and then The Waterboys. I’d never played with The Waterboys live, but Mike Scott invited me to join them for the songs I did on the album and it was really exciting to headline a stage, and come on with no rehearsal (except 10 minutes in a van with Mike). The mud was quite extraordinary, and only bearable when viewed through an alcoholic haze. I was pathetically underprepared too, arriving with binbags tied round my legs. By the time I’d found a place selling wellies I had sacrificed 2 pairs of shoes to the quagmire.

Two days later I found myself in New York taking out my mud–splattered pedals in the David Letterman studio. It was a strange juxtaposition. Letterman keeps his surprisingly small studio extremely cold – so much so that my fingers went numb (good thing I was playing slide). Once again the entire thing felt rather impromptu, being shoved on with minimal rehearsal, and all over in 5 minutes. It was only when I watched it back that it really clicked that I’d been on Letterman. One minute he was rabbiting away, then he said “Bryan Ferry”, and the next thing I saw was me! After that I stayed in New York for a couple of days to make a video for the first single off my next album with Bingo Gazingo. I took him to Central Park and round the East Village and filmed him accosting members of the public with his poetry. For an 82–year–old he has such incredible energy, and it can’t be because of his diet (ice cream and milkshakes, half of which end up down his shirt). One of the many highlights was when he stood in the middle of a playground and bellowed “I wanna put my iTube in your YouTube!” I also interviewed one of the other singers, Phoebe Legere, in her extraordinary apartment full of art, clothes, and fallen masonry. It is the only place I’ve ever been which one could describe as being ’littered with accordions’. She gave me raspberries and told me to sit out on her rusty fire escape (5 floors up) while she did the interview with the cameraman (she didn’t want me to hear).

Finally, yesterday I did the Diana tribute concert with Bryan. Surprisingly little to report, except that mercifully Wembley Stadium doesn’t seem quite as huge when you’re actually onstage. The only thing that threw me off were the troupe of models sachaying right over my pedalboard during the intro, which certainly didn’t happen at the runthrough. It was also eerily quiet onstage, adding to the unreality of it all. I just kept thinking “God knows when I’ll make it back here again, just enjoy it! Enjoy it!” and tried to balance the tragic desire to look vaguely ’stadium–y’ with trying not to play any wrong notes during the solos.