In terms of the writing of the music, I love how you approach sound. So many bands that have session musicians who are so intricate and…it’s soulless. I think what’s still powerful about your early works and your approach to sound is just that joy in the power of simplicity. I think it makes things last as well. Is that still…what gets you interested…new sounds?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly the same. It’s never gone away! I remember, I read a few years ago now, an interview with the guitar player from the Chili Peppers. He said it was to do with the melodies and how the simplicity of them was so important in my work. Where every note matters, every note that’s there, needs to be there. They don’t necessarily follow a pattern that you would expect. Now, see, that was something that I’d always been slightly embarrassed about. I’m not a good player at all, so I don’t come up with these very clever chords. So my simplicity, I always saw as a fault, a flaw, a lack of musicianship, fraudulent. One of the things that’s made me happier as I’ve got older is an understanding that what I do and the way I do it is no less valuable than someone that can go do a thousand notes a second. If anything has more depth and substance to it, it isn’t musically as good, in terms of technique or skill, but from a songwriting point of view is every bit as valid, if not more so and so that’s made me far more comfortable with my lack of ability as a musician. A songwriter and a musician are different things. I’ve understood now that my skill is not as the musician but as a songwriter. I can probably see myself more as a songwriter than anything else. That’s also changed the way I feel about technology. I used to feel a really strong, powerful need to be on top of technology to understand all the new things that came along. I would spend most of my spare time or working time reading manuals. I would have a stack of manuals beside my bed. As high as the bed. It just got taller and taller because before I’d finished one another, there’d be a new version, an update, a version 2 would come out of the manual. It just got stupid. I just couldn’t keep on top of this vast amount of technology that was developing all of the time. I came to understand that “that’s not your thing”. What you do is write songs. That’s where your focus needs to be. That’s what you need to make sure, you know, the quality stays up there. That’s what you need to spend your time on. Don’t worry about technology, you know, Learn it enough that you can record your ideas and your songs, then work with a really good producer who will have the problem of trying to keep on top of the technology. So, I work with Ade Fenton. We wrote five albums, maybe more. A quarter of my career been with Ade and so he has the headache of trying to keep on top of technology, but he’s more autistic than I am, so he bought me a T shirt saying “on the Spectrum”. We’re both on the spectrum, but he’s just all about gear. Yeah, he just…he understands. He comes over to my house once or twice a year in America and he just sets all my gear up. He sorts all that for me. I’m just sitting there going, thanks, you know, brilliant. I’ll go make you a cup of tea and I’ll come back.

Are you still doing stories as part of your process as well? I remember it was part of Replicas, and I think you mentioned you did it for Savages as well. Is that still very much a cornerstone of what you’re doing?

It’s not essential part of writing. I’ve done plenty of albums where they didn’t start as stories, but strangely enough, I think the best ones did. Songwriting as much as anything. I think for a lot of people, certainly including me, it’s a need. It’s almost like a valve that releases the pressure of what living brings to you. I find it pretty stressful. I don’t interact with the world easily at all. Gemma is my buffer between me and the rest of humanity. But she’s gifted at social interaction and I’m not at all. I find the world a frightening place. I find people frightening and cruel. I don’t think humanity is a particularly glorious thing. The opposite, actually. So for me, songwriting has been this need to get all these thoughts, these worries out, which I think one of my stuff has tended to be more on the sort of darker, depressing side. I mean, I’ve not written a happy song in…ever. I’ve written 400 songs or more on record and hundreds more that didn’t get on record; and not one of them’s been happy that I can think of. Cars. Cars is probably the happiest, poppiest song I’ve ever done and that’s about road rage.

It’s funny where that comes from when you view it. You had to drive on the pavement. I would never say it’s depressing. It’s more just beautiful. I don’t think it weighs you down, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I know what you mean. I say depressing, that probably isn’t the correct word actually, but it certainly tends to look on the dark side of things and it takes an idea or a possibility of where a topic may be going: where humanity, for example, may be going in the future. They tend to take a fairly extreme view because they’re more fun to.

I love the aesthetic of Savage and stuff that you guys produced. I think it was Gemma, wasn’t it, who sourced the costumes?

Well, we were looking for certain clothes. We had written down, Desert, what it was about and what the look needed to be. We’d actually found a series of things before we found those clothes and already bought them. We had a whole lot of stuff that arrived and was going through it and it’s pretty good. Then Gemma come across those clothes, that company, and it was just as if somebody had read my mind, you know!?

Then Dune came along. It feels like a precursor to Dune. Couldn’t they have just used your album as a soundtrack? You must feel that a little bit. It’s almost scary. It feels like they must have looked at you a little bit and went, right, okay, we’ll have a bit of that.

Yeah, well, it’s shockingly similar. It’s very interesting. But then again, the company that make the clothes, they’re the geniuses behind it. I just found them and stayed in the desert, you know, I did that whole sort of thing and it matched the music and it all worked really, really well. And it’s perfectly suited to Dune, you know, if you want to live on a desert planet. That’s what I was doing on Savage. The earth had become a desert planet because post climate apocalypse and so on. So it’s much the same thing. It just didn’t have the genius of that book behind it. I do intend to write the book that Savage stories came from. That’s going to be a major ambition of mine to get that done at some point.

You have some shows lined up that focus on specific albums from your past. I know sometimes you feel it veers towards nostalgia, but I definitely think it’s. I still think it’s good to have a fresh look at those albums.

Yeah, for a long time I was. I was so anti it. I wouldn’t entertain it at all. But then I was saying to you earlier, you know, part of. Part of me sort of beginning to come to terms with my history has allowed me now to occasionally indulge a little bit. I can remember the moment when this sort of re-evaluation of my history began. I was doing a guest slot with Nine Inch Nails. Trent had invited me to come on and do “Metal”.