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.