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.

I’m on a flight back from Shannon, having done the second in a run of shows with Iarla O’Lionaird. I have been trying to learn a bit of Gaelic so that I know what he’s singing about. He’s one of my favourite people to play with partly because of the sheer depth of feeling and sincerity in what he does, and partly because he’s such a funny man. In rehearsal barely 8 bars can pass without comment, but as soon as he sings you are plunged immediately back into intense emotion, so it feels a bit like being repeatedly winched in and out of a warm bath. As we came off stage last night his analysis of the gig was: “well lads, some of that was very good, and some of it was… good enough!”

A few more things with Brian Eno this month. The David Byrne collaboration is being mixed in New York so there have been lots of subtly different versions of things flying around and being decided upon. Brian, Jon Hopkins, Pete Chilvers and I spent a week improvising and developing ideas for the film score we’re working on. Once again I was impressed by the lightness of Brian’s touch – the way he often sits back and creates an atmosphere where it all feels like a bit of a game, and in that fertile soil grow ideas which always end up sounding definitively ‘Eno-esque”. I spent most of the sessions with Brian’s cat sitting on my shoulder. After the first day I decided to wear 2 layers to minimise injury.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in sessions recently, exacerbated by the proliferation of laptops: everyone (myself included) is fiddling around on the internet whenever not required to work. I walked into a David Holmes session a few months ago and everyone (except me) had just got iPhones. There was depressingly little conversation that week. In Brian’s studio a group email was sent out by Pete to test who was most neurotic about checking their email. I’m ashamed to say that I lost, although I maintain that it was just unfortunate timing.

The Eno/Hancock collaboration is proceeding well; I’ve begun to mix some of the tracks and am arranging for various vocalists to contribute. I came across a great Tuvan throat singer in a band called Yat-Kha, and got in touch with their producer Lu Edmonds. What an inspirational character he is. He came over and played me recordings he had made in the mountains of Tajikistan (which are virtually inaccessible most of the year), in minus-30 degree temperatures. The music was unlike anything I had ever heard – ancient Sufi texts incanted over rhythms and harmonies I could never have imagined, and could barely decipher. It was a true ‘exploding horizons’ moment – that rare occasion when music speaks directly to a part of you that you never knew was there. I’m going to mix some of it for Lu, and since hearing it I’ve felt more inspired than I have in ages.

Lastly this month, I did some recording for film composer Jody Jenkins, and did a few writing sessions with singers. One was Valentina who blends 60s psychadelia with hiphop. Another was Beth Rowley, who I produced a track for a few months ago. She can paint so many different characters with her voice, and she had a wonderful treasure-trove of developing ideas hidden away in her laptop, which were very original, charming and unsettling. I also helped my friend James Wolff record some new songs of his. He’s like the English successor to Jacques Brel and I urge anyone reading this to check him out: www.jameswolff.com

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.