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.