I’m on a tour bus with Jarvis Cocker, somewhere between Vienna and Amsterdam. It’s the morning after a night spent singing Beatles tunes until 4am and the air is still thick with tall stories, cigarette smoke and stale farts. The shows have been going well so far; Jarvis is playing only his new material, which is strong enough to rebuff the occasional heckle for Pulp tunes. We finish every night with a cover – last night was Paranoid (though it was very nearly I’m Too Sexy). The support band is different each night; in Italy Jarvis thought he’d be nice and go and watch a few songs, but the audience recognised him and turned away from the band en masse to try and get autographs. During the day I’m working on string arrangements for a band called The Envy Corps.

The year started in South Africa with Ronan. Probably my last gigs with him for quite a while. Although I respect him as a performer and like him very much as a person, the music does rather depress me. There is satisfaction to be had in doing a good job, but then you can get that playing music you actually like too. Still, I am grateful for the work, and for the very generous treatment the minstrels (as Ro’s tour manager calls us) receive. I explained all this in response to a question from the agent’s wife over dinner, after which her 8 year old daughter bellowed, “what, so you don’t like the music?!” well within range of everyone, including Ronan. Inexplicably omnipresent during the trip was a friend of the promoter, ostensibly there to help out, but who in fact turned out to be an arms dealer with an extremely dubious past in the apartheid–era police force and a wife who seemed mortally offended if she was unable to convince you to get drunk with her. The promoter himself, a delightful and apparently extremely well–connected and powerful man, seemed only too happy to stoop to the level of being hassled about all the tiny things tour managers hassle promoters about. It was all very mysterious.

Between these two trips I went to Paris with Bryan Ferry to do a live TV show, worked a lot on my new album, and produced some vocal sessions for Sylvie Lewis, who wanted to redo parts of her latest record. I really enjoy working with singers – it’s something I haven’t done for quite a while. Sylvie’s songs are very classic, almost instant ’standards’, and it was satisfying trying to get the vocals to be personal and characterful, and finding the right combinations of microphones and compressors to match. I also started work on a record with Katherine from the Smoke Fairies, which is going to consist of instrumental versions of hymns. I’m doing my acoustic and ambient things, and she plays banjo, lapsteel, slide and a few other bits. I’m trying to do as much as possible from memory instead of consulting my hymnbook, and it’s a lovely nostalgic feeling working with all those beautiful tunes in the absence of words I never really connected with anyway. What with all that and finishing off writing the follow-up to Honeytrap, I’m getting a bit worried about spreading myself too thin; I seem to record a lot and then not take as much of an interest as I should in promoting it, but I just love recording music and have virtually no interest in trying to draw attention to myself afterwards. It’s exciting having all these ideas bubbling away at the moment.

Yesterday I had the considerable pleasure of recording Brian Eno’s vocals for a track on my next record. I brought in an instrumental track and a rough melody, and he came up with the lyrics and some incredible backing vocals. It was so moving hearing him build up that familiar and beautiful sound of his on one of my tunes. I had to keep stopping myself from laughing. And all this was done in a gloriously informal setting with cats, sculptors and Polish accountants wandering in and out as Brian sang in front of the monitors (he hates singing with headphones) into a handheld mic.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on that record recently – mostly editing and arrangements since I want to leave the guitars til last to try and avoid excessive oberdubbage. I had some violinists over one day last week to do 6 tracks; they kindly agreed to play in return for dinner at The Crown organic pub which is my regular. My kind of people.

Other than that there have been a few sessions and gigs with various folk including Sylvie Lewis, an English singer living in LA who I met when she was opening up for Ed Harcourt on our American tour. She writes gorgeously arch songs with complicated jazz chords; the last time I had to play chords like that I was wearing a bad suit in the lobby of the Kensington Hotel aged 16. We were paid in toasted sandwiches and thought we really had it made. Then we got the sack.

I’m sitting at 39,000 feet somewhere above Greenland, on the way home from New York. The old man opposite me has distractingly large earlobes. Ed’s tour ended splendidly with lots of guest musicians onstage at the final show. The album we were working on in Boston actually got finished – it’s called ‘Idiot Savant’ and closes with a song we wrote together called ‘Grim Reaper Blues’. Sample lyric: ‘Life is hard for a necromancer/Why can’t someone find a cure for cancer?…It’s like buying a car and getting a lemon/I wanted Cliff Richard, they gave me John Lennon.’

After that I stayed on alone for a week in New York just recovering and hanging out with some friends we’d made along the way, including Sylvie Lewis and Essie Jain who opened up for us on the tour. Then in the last couple of days I’ve been in Excello Studios Brooklyn with Zach and Tim from the band Boomish, recording bass & drums for my next record. We managed 13 tracks in 2 days and I’m so excited - it’s going to be something really different. Can’t wait to get home and sift through all those takes, mmmmm…

Knackering though the tour was I feel revitalised after being in NY. There have been so many positive experiences, encouraging words and inspiring characters. Now for a wander up the aisle to stave off that thrombosis.