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.

It’s been a wonderful week. First came a concert supporting my friend Imogen Heap at Bush Hall. Hers was the first proper band I was in 8 years ago. We had a grand old time back then touring the shitholes of England during which, in many ways, she helped lay the foundations for my style (such as it is) by twisting my Classical brain with instructions like “make your guitar sound like an elephant”. It’s great to see her doing so well, and her audience was incredibly attentive and responsive to my set.

Then it was off to Ireland for a concert with Iarla O’Lionaird, the country’s foremost “sean nos” singer. The term means “old style”, but he likes to use electronic and ambient sounds too. The band was myself on laptop guitar and a great pianist called Graham Henderson. We spent a lovely 2 days at Iarla’s home in the countryside, playing with his children and doing a bit of rehearsing too. I had been a bit nervous, as I inherited the gig from Steve Jones (see below), an extremely original and talented player. But it turned into one of the happiest musical experiences of my life, mainly due to the sheer depth of feeling in Iarla’s voice. He’s a charming, frenetic, kind character and this beautiful voice just flies out of him. It is such an effortless, rich, benevolent sound. Sentimental but not cloying, passionate but unforced. The chord structures, rambling freely around the contours of long melodies, were new to me. Interestingly, at the concert in Cork I could sense a certain amount of uneasiness in the audience over the mixture of traditional and modern elements; there is a purism there which is slightly stuffy, and which would not be present outside of that environment. I can’t wait to play with him again.

The week ended with a concert in aid of the Stop The War Coalition. Brian Eno helped put it together and he asked me to join him, playing with Nitin Sawhney and Rachid Taha. Much of this took the form of me playing through Brian’s chain of Kaoss pads, which feels like being sonically mangled by a robot dj. Nitin is an extremely impressive musician. At the (brief) rehearsal he demonstrated alarming proficiency on guitar, piano, and electronic and vocal percussion. For such a disciplined talent he was remarkably open to ideas and his set ended up consisting mainly of semi-structured improvisations. In some ways it sounded similar to Brian’s band that I was in a few years ago. Brian has a very gentle but persuasive and potent way about him, and his musical personality shapes anything he is involved in, without his having to actually play that much. Rachid’s set was a blast. A French-Algerian protest singer of a sort, his pained voice exalts in defiance and struggle. During the soundcheck, standing next to Brian, I felt a little like Mini-Me or something (I’d felt this before doing a similar thing with Brian for Grace Jones), but the band were very welcoming and during the gig itself I felt more a part of it. The unrehearsed factor led to my accidentally leaving the stage in the middle of a song, when I misconstrued a break-down as an ending! But the most surreal moment of the evening came when Mick Jones of The Clash, guesting with Rachid on a cover of “Rock The Casbah”, asked me what key it was in.

What I really took away from this week has been the sheer depth and meaning in the voices of these artists, which comes in large part from some kind of folk tradition. It seems to me that there is an honesty, and therefore emotional authority in evidence, which makes a lot of the fake attitudes and affected voices sometimes present in more popular forms look supremely shallow and silly. Even though I’m lucky enough always to work with musicians I love, I’ve been shaken up this week and it feels good.

Oh, one more thing. An album I produced by Breadfoot featuring Anna Phoebe, is now available from www.breadfoot.com. It’s flatpicking guitar and banjo duets, and is very lovely.