Last week I took part in ‘Carousel’, a tribute to Jacques Brel at the Barbican. I’d been fairly familiar with his work, but having worked on it closely I now want to learn some proper French so that I can fully appreciate his incredible lyrics. The concert mixed French, English and Belgian singers – from Mark Almond and Momus to Arthur H and Arno – and as part of the house band I could more or less just sit back and enjoy. A non-musical highlight was hearing Arthur H translate the lyrics to ‘Madeleine’ for the audience: “She is all my life, we will eat goooood French fries…”, which made everyone in the room fall in love with him immediately. I got to use my favourite guitar – a 60s Italian thing made of sparkly plastic, with an enormous unforgiving neck, that sounds like it’s being played straight out of an old valve record player. It doesn’t get out much, but it made it onto the next Paloma Faith single too.

The week before, I was in with a new artist called Delta Maid. The producer was Craig Leon, a man of bafflingly and humblingly diverse talents, who has worked with everyone from Bob Marley and Blondie to Suicide and Pavarotti! It was fantastic to see a true master of arranging and producing at work (when we weren’t too busy getting him to tell us stories from his past). The music, which was steeped in traditions that I am by no means an expert on, was beautiful. Unbelievably it was Delta’s first experience playing with other musicians, but it didn’t show; a couple of times I sensed that I wasn’t quite getting the authentic feel she wanted, so I just got Craig to play those bits! After all, he was actually there for the ‘real thing’. The combination ended up working really well.

I went to Belfast with Jon Hopkins, for some sessions with David Holmes on a new film he’s scoring called ‘Gustav’. It is Russian, and as beautiful as it is grim. Jon and I basically spent 3 days improvising under David’s direction, and generated a load of material for David to sort through and tailor. I ended up playing a lot of guitaret (the rare thumb piano-like instrument that Eno gave me), and a £50 ukelele that David had bought recently. It was just a toy really, but played into his £3000 microphone, all the little imperfections and finger noises sounded very intense and atmospheric. When we got back, I played at one of Jon’s shows. Even in the thundering maelstrom of his live set, what he wants from his musicians is incredibly specific, and I felt slightly as though I was walking on eggshells; but I think it worked just having other people on stage (he usually plays alone), and the quiet bits took me back 15 years to when we used to play together at school concerts.

The Josephine Oniyama record got finished a few weeks ago. The last 4 or 5 days were spent mixing, and once again Josephine was extraordinarily patient during the boring bits (actually it’s all quite boring by then), inspired and passionate when called on to sing, supportive when I wobbled, and generally lovely to be around. The head of the record company came down and made some very useful suggestions – usually that is a moment to be dreaded but he comes from a musical background and was very helpful. The record deserves to do well. I also kept up the work on Iarla O’Lionaird’s album – adding a variety of strange and outsized bass instruments courtesy of Simon Edwards. I still feel this huge responsibility because of how much I love what Iarla does, but every time I hear his voice coming back through the speakers it inspires me.

I did a session for Skye Edwards (from Morcheeba), for a John Martyn tribute record – I had a bit of a hangover and hopefully it didn’t show too much. I hardly ever have them on sessions because it’s a bit miserable and scary, but luckily it was Skye’s honeyed voice coming through the speakers rather than something abrasive. There was also a day with film composer Alex Heffes, and Seb Rochford came to my studio with an artist he’s producing called Jay Brown (sister of VV). We managed to get 2 full tracks done in a day, and I just had to engineer – doing that alone is quite rare for me but I really enjoyed it, because I got to concentrate purely on mic positions and sounds, without the distraction of also having to play and produce. Seb played some absolutely incredible percussion, glass marimba and bass in addition to the drums, and we even got Jay’s managers to add handclaps at the end of the day.

And in between, I wrote a few songs with Chris Difford (of Squeeze); although not technically ‘with’, as he wasn’t there. But he sent me lyrics and asked me to come up with some music. I’d never worked that way before but found it incredibly inspiring. His words are like fully fleshed-out stories, and music just seems to rise out of them like a lovely aroma. I did 6 or 7 in a couple of days, and hopefully a few of them will go the distance.

Almost 2 months since my last entry… and despite it being holiday season I haven’t been on holiday. Well, I sort of have – for the best part of a month I was on tour with Marianne Faithfull. A punishing number of flights notwithstanding, I had a great time hanging out with my friends in various parts of Europe. I felt really grateful to Marianne – she’s been very kind and encouraging to me and she gave the music her all every night, which really helps when, half way through the tour, everything becomes a bit like Groundhog Day. Once the music gets familiar it’s sorely tempting to start embellishing, but because everyone else is doing it too the whoe thing can veer dangerously close to jazz. On this tour, I found that I was almost completely relaxed onstage – hardly even aware that there was an audience. It made me play so much better, because although at times I felt almost weirdly complacent, it let me play very honestly.

In the London-based gaps between dates, I put in a bit of an effort and finished my new album, on which I’m singing. It seems like every record is harder to make than the last, purely from a perfectionist point of view. My plan to get this one finished was to get other people in to build up the tracks and give me impetus. Cleveland Watkiss and Lisa Lindley-Jones contributed some amazing vocals, and helped me up my game. Pat Dillett, who mixed the Eno/Byrne album that I co-produced, is going to mix it. I’m proud of it, and so relieved to have it finished after sporadic fits of pique and doubt.

Speaking of David Byrne, he asked me to guest on a couple of songs at his show at the Barbican, playing some of the parts I played on the record. Virtually his entire show is choreographed, and the whole band is dressed in white. Plus they all wear headphones instead of having monitors onstage so it was very odd to put on white trousers, sneak onstage for a bit and then sneak off again to watch the rest of the show from the audience. The whole band were so incredibly friendly and happy, and I thought that mood would definitely be encouraged by playing such euphoric, energetic music for the best part of a year.

I did some co-writing with a new artist called Bahia, which was great because she was the type of artist who comes in with already-brilliant ideas and all I had to do was help with varying the chords a bit and developing the lyrics. In other situations it can be weird, when you basically end up writing the whole thing then handing over 50%. I also did a couple of days co-writing with Brian Eno; the method of working was that each of us took it in turns to contribute one thing to the track, and every half-hour we started a new one. Sort of like musical speed-dating.

Kate Schermerhorn, from whose documentary my EP ‘Searching 1906′ was taken, asked me to write the music to her new film, which is a wry study of marriage. For each of the cues I chose a different palette of sounds, but based the themes on peals of bells to give everything some unity. I actually found it quite difficult to watch the film at the same time because parts of it were very moving, so I had to try and just maintain the memory of it as I worked on the music.

Lastly, I’ve started producing a couple of albums. One is for Iarla O’Lionaird, who I’ve worked with for a while. Producing and writing with his feels like a big reponsibility because I have such respect and love for what he does. But Most of the time I manage to feel inspired and lucky instead of intimidated! His lyrics are mostly in Irish, but he frequently explains to me what they mean, and the meaning behind them. This affects the production, as the sounds need to reflect quite precisely what is happening in the words. I find this interesting, because of course not many listeners will know exactly what he is saying, but the story is somehow told in his singing and in the sounds. He is such a vivid communicator that I feel like I know what he’s singing about even when he doesn’t tell me.

The other artist is Josephine Oniyama, whose music manages to be simultaneously unsentimental and extremely moving. It is her first record but she is an incredibly accomplished singer. It is a huge relief when, hearing someone sing for the first time, it becomes clear that instead of having to really work to get a good vocal performance, you will be choosing between ‘very good’ and ‘sublime’. Musically, I’m going to try and follw my engineering hero Tchad Blake’s approach – schizophrenic contrasts between sounds, extreme panning, and no reverb. a guy called Fred Thomas is playing on both records. He plays piano, double bass and percussion – all extravagantly well. He has many projects of his own, my favourite of which is Magic Lantern. Check ‘em out!

A few years ago I played with Brian Eno at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan. It was the best time I’d ever had on stage, until last month when I was lucky enough to be a part of his Pure Scenius concert at the Sydney Opera House. The actual concert has been exhaustively documented elsewhere (improvised, 3 concerts in a day, tea-making facilities & tent on stage, etc) so here are a few observations from the ‘inside’.

I arrived feeling bleary and made my way into a very brightly-lit room containing lots of equipment. Everyone else in the band was extremely nice but obviously we were all somewhat nervous. The 2 days ‘rehearsing’ were actually more of a way to get acquainted with each other’s musical personalities. A few general pointers did emerge though, often based on Brian’s ability to spot people’s strengths and create space for them to be highlighted. The best example of this was the piano duet, which came about after Brian mentioned Jon Hopkins’ extraordinary ability to echo very complex chords. So like a beautiful little musical tennis match Chris Abrahams would play sparse, beautifully Feldmanesque chords, and Jon would softly and perfectly reiterate them. Karl Hyde and Brian acted as ‘frontmen’ with a difference, and whereas they each had texts to deploy at will, the manner of deployment was no more planned than it would have been had there been no rehearsal at all. The heart of the band was The Necks, whose experience with large-scale improvised music lent a coherence and assurance to the music. Their sense of space seemed to radiate out across the rest of us, and it was extraordinary how sparse and deliberate much of the music sounded, considering how many musicians there were, and how many ideas must have been going through everyone’s heads.

There was rather a strange atmosphere at the start of the first concert I remember, and for a few minutes it seemed that some of the confidence and invention that had been overflowing in rehearsal might have gone missing in the cavernous concert hall. But we felt our way into our new surroundings after a little while. It was interesting to witness the effect of playing 3 concerts in a row on the psychology of the performance. During the first I felt like we were all on our ‘best behaviour’; the second was probably themost successful, a good balance struck between nerves and assurance; the third felt more like the rehearsals because we were so used to the environment. This meant there were some brave things that worked brilliantly, and some that meandered. Personally I felt that it was really saved by the brutal encore, with everyone utterly determined to end on a high. The decisions to remain onstage while the audiences came and went, and to have tea-making facilities and sofas, were both witty and extremely clever. I shall never forget drinking tea whilst watching The Necks in front of a packed Opera House, chatting to Brian and Jon, my old schoolfriend, about how we thought the gig was going. What please me most was that Brian enjoyed it. He deserved to – for taking a huge chance with a brave concept, for being able not only to compose but more importantly to create space and conditions for good things to happen, and for making what could have been an intimidating engagement nothing other than fun and fascinating. Thank you Brian.

Returning from Sydney at 5am after a sleepless 26 hours (4 babies doing tag-team tantrums), I had to get straight on the Eurostar to Paris for shows with Marianne Faithfull. The other guitarist was Marc Ribot, who I had never met and who is the guitarist I admire and love most in the world. It was distinctly odd meeting him when I was in such a dishevelled state, but (predictably) he turned out to be a lovely, generous, witty person. He played so well that on a few occasions I had to choke back tears. It’s just a wonderful and humbling thing to witness someone so good at what they do, and it has inspired me to really make an effort to get better at my instrument. It was one of those times when, feeling like you’re at the bottom of a mountain, instead of getting discouraged by the prospect of the climb you just see beauty. And knowing that he liked some of the stuff I did gave me a simple, innocent satisfaction that no amount of applause from a crowd ever seems to bring.

When I got home from all that, I got stuck straight into my new record. To my surprise I am really enjoying singing and writing lyrics. It takes effort and a little courage to persuade myself to set up the mic and give it a go, but once I’m there I can get into it more, and listening back afterwards it seems to be getting closer and closer to what I’d imagined. There’s always a lot of tidying to do towards the end of a project, so for every day performing or recording other people there seem to be another 2 spent editing. But my plan to ‘force’ myself to finish by booking other musicians in has paid off and it’s nearly finished.

In fact it might even be finished next week were it not for Marianne’s tour, which has just started. My plan to minimise the insanity of constant air travel and hanging about involves a Russian language course and about 8 hours of audio from the Scenius concerts and rehearsals, which I am going to try and edit into shape. I find that if I can get something worthwhile done in the day, then I really enjoy the concert at the end of it – which of course is how it should be.

I had another improvised gig this month, with Leafcutter John. As with Scenius, it was partly guided by verbal suggestion and partly by a moving graphic score. Notes are not specified, but approximate pitch, velocity and attitude are determined by coloured shapes that scroll across the screen. John is brilliant at devising these and it is surprisingly tricky to follow well. It’s particularly fun for the audience to see the score I think, because there is an intuitive understanding of how it works, but some things remain a mystery. I seem to be doing more and more improvised gigs; I played one with Seb Rochford and Tom Herbert from Polar Bear a while back which was the most fun I’ve had in ages. It seemed to allow me to play more like ‘myself’, and later in the year I’m going to try and capture some of that in the studio.

I also did a couple of sessions for a great tv and film composer called Daniel Pemberton. Those sorts of sessions, whith an orchestra, are run incredibly precisely and session lengths are strictly enforced. If things go even 30 seconds overtime the atmosphere perceptibly changes as technically, musicians are meant to be paid overtime. It is so completely different to the usual ‘turn up at about 11, set up, have lunch and you should be free by 9′. On the one hand it’s quite fun because I get to feel like a ‘professional’, but on the other it seems a little ‘jobsworth’-y at times. Many of the musicians have crosswords or books on the go suring the session, I guess because they find the music so easy compared to what they were trained to do. I guess it’s not that different to me having a glass of wine on stage. And they always sounds great. But the emotion comes from the musical score, via the players’ technical competence, rather than the musicians as individuals. By contrast, in a band situation everyone is essentially a soloist, and expected to contribute more than a somple rendering of the notes, no matter how efficient or sympathetic (when there are ‘notes’ to render at all). This leads to 2 different kinds of ego problem!

Lastly, for Pure Scenius one plan was to try and come up with new musical forms, that we would present in concert as if giving a lecture from even further in the future. That didn’t quite work out, but here were my ideas anyway:

Communist Pointillism (most notably manifested as North Korean StutterPop): planned harmony is rejected as bourgeois. Musicians are each required to play no more than one note at a time – minimal deviation from which is tolerated. the resulting ‘chords’ and ‘melodies’ will be true products of the people, a musical triumph of collectivism.

Sub-Club: a nightclub playing loud mechanistic dub where no frequencies between 200Hz and 10000Hz are permitted, enabling civilised conversation to occur at the same time as furious pumping.

World Serialism: the music of the Second Viennese School has finally become part of the populist vernacular, and serialism is valued as a true artistic reflection of post-lapsarian liberation. Particularly popular in conjunction with Persian rhythms.

Dynamic Incongruity: an exercise in group- and self-regulation; playing with maximum musical aggression at the lowest possible volume, and conversely rendering the tenderest phrases as brutal sonic assaults. Gradual and sudden collective shifts between the two, with a conductor acting as a human ‘master fader’.

Practise Rooms: a recreation of what it’s like to walk through the halls of a music college – each player absolutely in their own world, creating a cacophonous melange of styles and tones (perhaps only a short demonstration would be desirable).

I recently got back from a tour of Italy, playing my own music accompanied by a wonderful dancer and video artist called Isobel Blank (she did the video to Banks Of Kyoto off my last record). Having someone else with me made me enjoy playing so much more, and it was both mesmerising and relaxing to watch her move as I played. I encountered nothing but kindness and hospitality wherever I went, so sincere thanks to all that helped us. The high points were a moonlit swim in a crystal clear lake, and making friends with 9 cats on farm in the mountains; the low point was sweeping and mopping the filthy floor of a Bolognese squat where for some reason we had been asked to play on what would have been our only day off, only for the show to be canceled due to lack of promotion. And yet even this was somehow a joyous experience.

Brett Anderson’s record was finished in a 2 week flurry of activity; we managed to record woodwind and cello on 13 tracks in a single day, and fortunately we found that in the course of writing the material, a lot of the vocals and guitars could be kept. So it was more a case of polishing up what we already had than of starting again. His combination of a keen critical ear with the willingness to experiment made the experience a pleasure. The pressure of producing comes from the fact that you are effectively in charge of someone else’s artistic statement, and no matter how seriously and lovingly you approach it, for the person whose name goes on the sleeve, it carries a much greater sense of importance. The trick to making an honest and interesting recording is, I think, is to keep a serious-but-lighthearted atmosphere of openness and experimentation, with little overt consideration of the consequences. Brett was very open to this and I do think we have made an honest, interesting record.

I played in a Nick Drake tribute concert this month, with guest singers ranging from Martha Wainwright to Graham Coxon doing versions of the great man’s songs, under the guidance of Drake’s original producer Joe Boyd. We also had the original arranger Robert Kirby, and for me it was a particualr joy to hear that incredible string writing come to life before my eyes and ears. Neill Macoll took care of all Nick’s parts (I can’t think of a single other guitarist who could have done as good a job as him), which left me free to cruise around in ambient land trying not to get in anyone’s way.

Hearing Robert Kirby at work definitely inspired me in the string arranging work I did this month, even though it was for very different artists – Paloma Faith and Taio Cruz. The latter is kind of R&B which is a total departure for me, and to be honest not the kind of thing I would normally listen to but there was something about it that was incredibly emotional and that made arranging the strings (frequently employed as musical tear-duct stimulators) quite an intense undertaking. It was also my first foray into doing the scores on computer instead of by hand. I do have to admit that it’s quicker, but there’s not quite as much poetry in the process, and it doesn’t look as beautiful. I’m not sure what the ultimate effect of a beautiful handwritten score is on the end musical result, but it’s a bit like wearing particularly high-quality underwear I think – not many other people know that it’s there, but it lends an exquisite quality to the day. Plus the musicians always love it (the handwritten scores, not the underwear).

There were a couple of radio shows in Paris with Marianne Faithfull, and a bunch of sessions for Brigitte Fontaine and a famous woman who is trying to make part of her next album without the record company realising, so no further comment there. I also played on an advert (rare occurrence) for a huge American hardware store. They really went all-out on the music: coming to London, getting a huge studio and bringing lots of creative people from the agency over. One of them brought his young son who asked me to autograph his plectrum, which I found incredibly sweet. It was, frankly, reassuring to see so much money sloshing happily around at a time like this and also interesting to see how, musically, it was every bit as serious as a session for an actual album. Also odd screwing around with obscure 60s Italian guitars and making little delay loops, whilst staring at a screen full of DIY equipment… but it was another ‘I love my job’ moment.

The Brett Anderson project has been coming along well. During the writing process we’ve managed to get quite a bit of the recording done too. There’s an integrity to the the feeling of very early performances that can be hard to recapture. In some cases we’ll be able to use the first time I played the song, and the first vocal. There are lots of classical arrangements, which I still prefer to do on paper than on computer. Somehow it makes me consider each player more, as well as encouraging a more detailed use of dynamics. Copying out all the individual parts is a bit of a chore, but it’s also strangely meditative and satisfying.

I was on the receiving end of the score when I did two more concerts with Gavin Bryars. Again, it was both a challenge and a pleasure to trespass into the classical realm. The biggest challenge for me was learning a new way to connect with the other performers and fit in with the fluid pulse. You find yourself watching for their breathing, the direction of their bows, tiny inclinations of the head, and it’s beautiful to be a part of. Unfortunately when things go a bit wrong it’s infinitely more upsetting than playing a bum note in a gig.

Lot of sessions this month, which are still what I love doing most. I played on a couple of Florence And The Machine tracks, including ‘Girl with One Eye’ which is mostly a duet between guitar and voice. I decided to try and closely reflect musically what the lyrics were saying, and I think we made something quite special and unusual, like Jacques Brel meets White Stripes. I did another day on the Brigitte Fontaine album, with lots of 60s fuzz, plugged straight into the desk instead of through an amp for extra fizz, and a Duke Special record of unreleased Kurt Weill tunes which required various disruptive elements from toy piano to hurdy-gurdy and marxophone. I got to work with Ed Harcourt again on a track he’s written for Paloma Faith. Having played his music for years it always feels like coming home for me when we work together, and it can be great to have the kind of relationship with someone where you grow to instinctively understand what they want and why. On sessions for a 60s-set film called ‘Hippie Hippie Shake’ the composer, Christian Henson, provided both glorious harmonies and fine cakes. He also advised us to ‘look at the screen around bar 63′ for evidence of CGI done on one of the leading ladies in order to bring her ‘hairstyle’ more into line with the fashions of the time.

My friend Ben Nichols has a project called Dennis Hopper Choppers and he decided to try and make a whole album in 2 days. The whole studio was one big room, with the mixing desk in the same space as all the players, which is a great way to work as it eliminates a lot of shouting at glass with headphones on. Another good friend Foy Vance was making 2 EPs at once in his shed, and I went over for a day to help produce one. It seems like there’s a lot of people trying to do the maximum amount in a short space of time, and I actually think that’s healthy because you end up with more of a sense of an exciting moment in time being captured. There was one crazy day where suddenly Natalie Imbruglia needed work done on a track that very evening, and ended up sitting on my slightly crummy sofa at midnight chatting with King Creosote, who was working with Jon Hopkins in the other studio. Usually it’s me going elsewhere to work with these people and it can be slightly odd when they’re actually in your house.

And lastly, my new album ‘The Grape And The Grain’ came out last month. I did a few radio and internet tv things for it, one of which involved being crammed into a hot glass cupboard with a student who didn’t know anything about radio equipment, and playing/talking for an hour before she realised she’d been broadcasting nothing but dead air! There’s a weird tension to playing on radio and tv that, even after doing it for so long, still continues to disconcert me. I did Jools Holland with Marianne Faithfull the other day and managed to utterly balls up an introduction that, in the absence of a camera inches from my right hand, I could have played in my sleep. It’s like all the muscles go really tense and everything’s suddenly difficult. I think you sort of have to train your mind not to focus on it; we did another show and I was fine, I think because it was 9am and Peter Mandelson was next to me, which was surreal enough to take the edge off. Very professional.