This is the full text of David Hepworth's interview with Elvis conducted on February 16th 2008. It appears in the April edition of The Word Magazine.

I like your Lexus advert where you just talk about Beethoven. Did they give you a car?

Not yet (laughs) but I never thought anyone would pay me to sit in the back of car and talk bollocks. They said talk about music that you like and I made a couple of suggestions. The other one was Harry J's 'Liquidator' but the guy that owned it wanted, like a hundred million dollars to license it. I think you just go in and you just improvise - they don't even mention the name of the product, I don't understand how it's supposed to be an ad. I've never understood advertising, frankly, I think you're an idiot if you buy something if it's in an advert. So I'm quite happy to take, you know, to be paid to talk about music, not that there's anything particularly illuminating about what I say. Are they showing it in the UK?

It's like everything. I saw it on YouTube.

I think everybody sees everything on YouTube. I think there's a whole generation of people that wear glasses because they're watching what previously was high definition television on this tiny imitation television, about two inches wide on a computer screen, all fuzzy.

In the UK they're trying to extend the term of copyright protection for recorded works from 50 years.

I won't say it's indefensible morally, but you can't defend it practically. I don't really know how you're supposed to enforce it, it's the same thing as pirating, you know, I think the cat's out the bag. I don't agree with people just taking things, you wouldn't do it with another product, if that's the way you see it. And it's all wrapped up in this slightly bogus argument about, you know, art should be free. Well, you can't walk in to a gallery and take a painting off the wall, can you? And it's always the smartarses always then go, yeah, but these are mass produced, it's not, it's like a print of Monet, you know, it's not the original. But equally you can't steal a print of Monet from a shop, you know, without getting arrested, so that argument's bullshit. I don't really know what they're trying to achieve, because I haven't read it.

They're saying that the people who perform on songs but don't write them should participate in the revenue for as long as the person who writes it. Some people see it as just the record companies trying to hang on to their revenue stream as long as they possibly can.

Yeah. Well, I suppose if they're benefiting and not the people who actually created it, yeah, they've got a point, you know. And there's always an argument between, there's players that have lit up records and the thing that you actually remember. Wasn't there a case of Herbie Flowers a few years ago about the bass line of Walk On The Wild Side? Because the bass line is as much a hook as some other things on that record are, though, you'd have to say that none of them could have started to do any of those things unless Lou Reed had written the song, so which comes first?

I see you're touring with The Police. I wondered how you accounted for the fact that you're both still around, as are loads of people, loads of artists from that time.

You've got to think about the people who began their interest in you with something that you did maybe ten years ago, 20 years ago, five years ago, last week, you know. And their interest is as valid and it's as much a reason to do what you do as somebody who has followed you enthusiastically, or even with a slightly grudging attitude. And, you know, of course, obviously there are people that listen to somebody and they just want them to stay the same always and that's a peculiar thing of pop music. You get it with authors, go write one like the same as that first book, you know. Try saying that to J.D. Salinger, you know. Just write another Catcher in the Rye and it would all be good.

The thing that makes musicians different is you make so many records.

Yeah, but in the last 30 years people have made far less records than, than certainly when I was young. Most of the bands that I liked when I was a kid and even as a teenager, were making two albums a year. And then, you know, the people that I liked in jazz, they might make five albums in a year or two; they'd make their swinging record, then they'd make their ballad record, then they'd make their Latin record, then they might do an after-hours mood or, you know, all the different sort of styles that people went through. And because they didn't all get announced as if they were the unveiling of a great new building, they were just allowed to come out and be what they were, I don't think people got so neurotic about it. You either liked it or you didn't, and that's much simpler. They were working all the time and I don't suppose they made a tremendous amount of money off those records, but the people that put them out were in the business of recording music, that wasn't just one thing on a balance sheet, along with, say, sewage or something else, which is the case, now, isn't it? You get companies that own a record company and it's just one of the very minor things that they do and yet they expect it to be predictable like a bottle of pop, you know. They've got the wrong idea, maybe they've got the wrong idea that we're pop, you know, I don't know. I don't like to think too much about the business side of things, I'm really trying to detach from it. I think, you know, there's no solution because you have to go with the musical side of what you do and hope that the rest of it works out.

So what do you think of the massive business that live music has become? It's no longer the thing you do just to promote the record, it's a huge business in its own right.

Well, it depends on who you are. I mean, there's somebody playing music somewhere tonight, with a tip jar on a piano. Just as surely as there's somebody playing in an underground station with a hat. And then there's people that are on massive tours which are like Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Huge logistical disasters and triumphs. And they are very big money, but there's a lot in-between. I don't really think you can generalise like that. The minute there is money to be made there are going to be people that want to annex all of the power and control and there are corporations that are as determined to control every aspect of everything to do with live, just the same way as record companies want to control every aspect of music making, without necessarily having the flexibility to do it, or the sensitivity to do any of it well. So it's quite good when you can do things sometimes through the machine and sometimes not. I work in lots of different ways myself, you know, I can only go on my own example. Sometimes you go out there and there's a very, very definite plan of how to get through a number of dates, other times the shows are kind of one-offs. Festivals are one-offs, usually, but some of those are highly organised now by these big conglomerates and others are much more spontaneous like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco, which is basically the gift of one man to the city. It nominally is a bluegrass festival, because Warren Hellman, the man who funds it, he's a financier of some kind, he bankrolls the entire festival every year and they have it in Golden Gate Park. And, you know, I did it, they hadn't had a Friday show before, they just do it over a weekend normally, so they had a Friday afternoon show for the first time and when we played, at the same sort of place where the Dead did their shows in the sixties, it's that kind of place, you know, it's like just a dell in this park and then just a festival stage, much more like a festival of a modest scale. It was just a very, very good atmosphere and Richard Thompson played it, Steve Earle was there, Ricky Skaggs, Emmylou Harris, a lot of people that I like and a lot of people that are friends of mine. It was uncharacteristically relaxed, you know, it wasn't a big hyped up atmosphere there and there were smaller stages with people that you hadn't heard of, that you could discover. I also played MerleFest down in North Carolina, which is named for Merle Watson, the late son of Doc Watson, the bluegrass guitar player and again, they invited me to play and I thought that was a bit of a long shot, given that's quite a traditional bluegrass festival. But I have some songs that I can put over on just one guitar. So I took Larry Campbell with me, who's a great guitar player and then they assembled a band around me. And I saw some amazing stuff at that festival and it's like JazzFest in New Orleans is the same, only they have the deeply traditional things, they've got a gospel tent, they've got all of the traditional New Orleans players from jazz and R&B and then they'll have some, I suppose you could call them mainstream. Like the year I played it with Allen Toussaint they had they had Bruce Springsteen opening his, the Seeger Sessions, that was the first show that they did.

You toured with Bob Dylan recently?

I did five weeks. It was great because I was playing solo between Amos Lee and his band and Bob and his band. And he plays quite big places. I mean, he was playing at mostly college arenas, which are quite hard sonically. You've got a little bit of a easier chance of being heard the less volume there is. Not that I'm quiet, exactly, but I think people were a bit surprised that it was, that it was energetic, at the same time it was also clear, because those things are not really designed for music, they're mostly designed for basketball. And also the other thing that people don't probably know, perhaps don't know in England, is that Bob has quite a considerable young audience these days. I don't know whether it's because he did have a number one record and he also had this crazy iPod commercial and that's piqued some people's interest maybe for the first time. And he's just one of those figures that, you can read about him in a history book, so of course some younger people are going to become curious about him. And when we played the colleges the audience tended to be younger and that meant that they had absolutely no clue who I was, except maybe just, maybe knew one song or two songs. So, again, we had a lot of freedom. I mean, I could play brand new songs. And I only had a 45 minute set anyway, so I'd open with something vaguely familiar, close with something familiar and do whatever I wanted in the middle. And that's pretty much what I'm planning to do with The Police as well, because their audience won't know us either, they'll know the obvious songs, but they're not going to know every tune of mine, because they're Police fans.

As a lifelong fan, you must have a dual purpose in doing those shows, that you want to play, but also you just want to see Bob Dylan, you want to learn about Bob Dylan. Did you learn anything about Bob Dylan by doing that tour?

Not that I suddenly found the key to him or something except the very obvious thing that he's very unpredictable and that's one of the things that makes him great. You really can't pin him down. You know, we did play together on the tour, we did a number together on one of the shows, which was great, and we sang Tears Of Rage together with just two acoustic guitars and on another night, on the closing night, we had Amos and I go out and sing I Shall Be Released with him, which I had sung with him in the past, you know. And we spent a little time together, but, you know, the days are long when you're travelling and sometimes you arrive at different times. You might go several days on a major tour like that and never see the other artist on the bill because your schedule and where you're headed next, mean that you keep separate schedules. I didn't go on the tour with the idea of unravelling some puzzle about him, I was curious to see him play as much as I could. I usually watched his show for a good part of it, because he would always end up doing different songs and there would be new arrangements and it was very interesting, I really enjoyed that, I had a great time on that tour.

Clearly he's unpredictable, if not fearless, in terms of live performance. He's not afraid to take risks that very often go wrong, which most performers will insure against. Do you admire that?

You know, I saw Bill Monroe just before he died and Dylan has a quality of people that are in that tradition, much more than people that are in say the tradition of the large stadium rock bands, like the Stones, who I've played with a couple of times over the last couple of years. And although they're very, very good and for the people that want to go and see them, they don't let them down. I mean, the last show I did with the Stones was in Soldier Field in Chicago in October, which is quite late to play outside in Chicago, and it was 35 degrees on stage, the night of the show. And you had to say that Mick Jagger was absolutely amazing, I mean, he just, he was not going to let the audience feel as if they'd wasted their money. The band itself was huddled together around heaters in the centre of the stage playing the best they could, because you literally couldn't feel your hands, and Mick is on the front of the stage, doing what he does, being a super showman. But you never feel it's going to go anywhere that you can't guess. With Dylan that's not so much the case. You know, he might sing in an unintelligible way for three numbers and suddenly become clear. And he might suddenly do a song he's not done in ten years. I mean, there's an element of risk with that. And I know which disposition I lean to myself, so of course I'm more inclined to be intrigued by the person that takes that risk.

How much risk can you take yourself with your own live shows nowadays?

Well, I do it in a different way. For myself it's more that I play some shows solo - in a short time period, you know, I played a show solo, a show with Steve Nieve, which is a different thing because obviously the songs that we can select when Steve is there are the ones that can be harmonically denser, that require piano accompaniment, you know. But no, I did the solo shows with Dylan and then I played some shows with a symphony orchestra. People that are prejudiced against hearing a pop singer or just specifically me sing with an orchestra, they're theorising about the idea of that show, not the reality of it. There's nothing particularly safe about that because you get one rehearsal and you've got to make all this music which has previously written down, you've to make a credible comprehensible picture out of maybe as little as three hours rehearsal for a two hour show. If that isn't a high wire act, I don't know what is. But the fact that it doesn't have drums and snarling vocals and electric guitars to some people's minds makes it safer. Like the critics' lexicon about orchestral instrumentation, whether or not it's being used in pop music or in classical music or anything in-between, is very limited, to say the least. Strings are always cheesy, steel guitars are always lachrymose, you know. It's just a lazy, knee-jerk reaction to hearing something that you're not familiar with and if you take the time to listen you'll find lots of things are going on, not just on my shows, but any show that you go to see with any different group. Just as one rock and roll band is not the same as the next one. Some play hard or some play leaner, some play actually quite quietly, some are blasting. Some are more tipped to acoustic instrumentation with drums, others are purely electric. Some are purely synthesized and nothing twanging. I mean, there's as much variety in any orchestra as there is among those differences.

So give us some insight into what's going through your head when you're on stage in front of a large crowd...

It clearly depends on what the circumstances are. It's like that thing they say about radio, you've done radio, haven't you? You shouldn't talk as if you're talking to millions of people, you talk as if you're talking to one person. I don't really think there's that much difference. The only time it's different is if you play a festival where the audience may not have any knowledge or even interest in you and you're just one of a number of things presented. So you come on the stage and at that particular time there might only be a small handful of people who have any knowledge or interest in what you're doing. So, you know, the way things proceed is influenced by that. But most times you're playing a show where people have bought a ticket, they presumably came along with the idea that they wanted to see you. We won't play very long on The Police tour, I don't know how long they'll want us to play for, I can't imagine more than 45-50 minutes. So it's a fairly brief story that we're telling, you know, compared with a show that we might play for two hours.

How do you know when it's going to be a good one, when you're one stage, are you looking for certain signs that it's going to work, it's going to go down well with the audience, the band are going to play well?

I don't really see any reason why the band won't play well, unless the acoustics are just defeating. You get some places and you just can't hear yourselves and it's hard to get any kind of coordination. And some places the energy seems to be sucked out by maybe the chairs are too plush or, as is in the case of some of these arenas, which wouldn't be my choice if I were planning a tour, you know, they're too metallic and therefore you're wondering whether the people can actually hear anything.

Do you look for things in the audience, do you look for people or reactions?

Obviously it would be good if somebody's flinging themselves around, it looks like they're having some sort of time. But, you know, people that push their way down to the front of shows quite often don't know why they're there, or they do know why they're there, but you'd rather they weren't. You know, like people that are standing there stock-still like dressed like you twenty years ago or something like that to try and get a reaction. I glanced at Bob's audience when I went out to duet with him and the whole front row had Venetian carnival masks on. I thought, no wonder he sets up away from the edge of the stage. But, you know, I sat in the audience, you know, a lot of nights, and the people back in the audience weren't weird, it was just those few overwrought people down there that felt that *they* were the show.But you shouldn't take anything from just a handful of obsessives, you know. God bless them, there's a degree of illness to that, I think, to come along like that. You know, there's 50,000 people in a football stadium, cheering on one side or the other, and then there are the people that believe they have mental powers that can make the ball go into the goal, you know. Most people are just supporters, you know, that's the difference. But, no, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it, because I shouldn't be, I should be just singing.

You don't find your attention wondering or anything like that occasionally? No?

No.

Not ever.

My attention does not wander.

Right. Do you ever get stage fright?

Not usually. No, I don't think so, no, not really stage fright, no. I mean, one should get nervous, you know, I think it's good to get nervous. In some sort of way, it comes out in some sort of way like you start worrying about some really irrational thing like the colour of your socks or something like that and that's your mind deflecting the nerves to something irrelevant really, rather than letting it affect the thing that you're really about.

Have you been asked to write an autobiography?

Since 1978. So obviously I thought that was a fairly ludicrous request as I hadn't lived any life. I am under contract to Simon & Schuster, to write a book, which is quite late now. And I'm about to go back and discuss with them a more realistic timetable for completing it. But an autobiography as such, I just thought there was perhaps a slightly less self regarding way of writing about some things that matter to me, but just not like every detail of my life because I just don't think it's that interesting.

But it's supposed to be an autobiography, is that the plan?

No, no, not really. No, I said I wanted to write basically narratives that took as a starting point the scenarios of particular songs that I selected, of mine. Because sometimes, obviously, there's more of a story than you can fit in a three minute song or even a five minute song. And I thought it might be more entertaining to read the full story, the beginning, you know, what went before, what went after, because I deliberately chose songs, obviously ones that were either, I wouldn't say more personal, but ones that had particular significance to me. That's the best way I can explain it without it sounding very impenetrable. Because I don't believe it will be impenetrable, well, I know it isn't impenetrable on the page, I know what I have written makes some sort of sense. But describing something, it's like trying to describe a painting, you know, or trying to describe a song, you have to hear it. You can tell people, oh, I heard that song, it's about such and such, but the experience is about hearing it in words and music, that's why it's called a song. And I wonder sometimes about my decision to even print words on sleeves, I think I liked it better when I didn't because, you know, then people could mishear things, make up their own versions. And a lot of things that you get to do over a long time, regard to the material you may have written, allows you to make up a new story that joins maybe the ideas of one song with a newer song that might something in common with it. When I have a new batch of songs, whether they be a record or whether they just be some new songs, there's usually other songs in my catalogue with which they keep happier company, if you know what I mean.
For instance, when I had The Delivery Man, the songs from King of America and Blood and Chocolate, that sat around those songs, because they shared something musically, but they also shared something in terms of some of the ideas in the songs. And that's all I'm trying to do in this book, is just find that kinship between other thoughts that I've had, other characters that may not have been included in some of the songs that are about characters.

What music have you been listening to recently, for yourself? How do you use music, if you like, for leisure or whatever?

Well, it depends on where I am, you know, it depends on where I am. Obviously when I was travelling along on the Dylan tour I was on my own on a bus, just a couple of my crew and I'm listening to whatever I'm listening to. I was doing a lot of writing on that tour, I had a lot of time on my own. I spent all of last year on the road, from about April to November, with a couple of breaks, because Diana and I had our twin boys, Frank and Dexter were born the December before, so at six months they went on the road with their mum. And I went along too, because I was obviously anxious that family life on the road was going to be good for them. And we've got some people helping her, so that she can do her work and she gets to leave the boys with somebody very capable. But it was also peace of mind for me to go along for the first couple of trips, so I spent the time that I wasn't on my own tours on her tours, just being Dad. If you're waking up with, as they were, nine month old boys, you're listening to different music than if you're waking up in a hotel room on your own and you turn on the TV or put on the radio or whatever it is or your iPod.

So have you got up to speed with children's music recently?

EC Some children's music, but I think it's good for even little kids to hear all sorts of music. I mean, their mother was playing shows until she was seven months pregnant, so they heard music since before they were born. Children can hear music in the womb. They certainly seem to react to music and when music comes on they fling themselves about and of course they like the children's songs but they also like rock and roll.

Right. But you always give the impression that you listen to an awful lot of stuff. Is that the case?

I suppose I do, but I don't feel like some compulsion to hear, to know every new release. I think there was a time when I felt that way, but I don't feel it now. Mainly because I think most of the interesting stuff that I actually encounter tends to come to me more at the margins or in dusty corners than it does blaring out of the mainstream, you know.

Well, whether it be an old or a new record or something somebody given to me or something by somebody I know. I don't really know the last major release that I really thought, oh, that's a really thrilling thing. I liked In Rainbows, but you know what I reckon I liked more, was Johnny Greenwood's soundtrack for *There Will Be Blood*. I mean, that one I really liked what he did and I thought it was great. I haven't even seen the film, but I was curious to hear what he wrote and I really liked it as a piece of music, you know, which may give me the reason to go to the theatre to see it, I suppose.

You've got an iPod.

Of course, yeah, it's a very good device for carrying a lot of stuff around with you.

And you use it a lot.

It has everything from Arctic Monkeys to Zamballarana, do you know what I mean?

Zamballarana. I'm not familiar...

That's a really good group from Corsica. I think they've disbanded now, but a really beautiful group.

Do you think the iPod changes our relationship to music?

For a short while I really didn't want to make anything at all because it could be dismantled. I don't like the idea that everything can be excerpted before you've even given it a chance to live as you intended for it to be heard because why would you put all that work into making it sound a certain way if it's just, we're just going to take a bite out of it. You don't walk into a cake shop and just stick your finger right in the middle of a cake and take a piece out, you just don't do that, it's bad manners. It's sort of, there's an air of entitlement about it which I don't think's entirely healthy. But, of course, you can't make any conditions for how or what people do with music that you make once you've put it on any device, whether it's a vinyl record or a cassette or an 8-track or a 78 or, you know, pill form or something that we haven't even encountered yet, some dastardly plan that they're cooking up right now in a laboratory. I've no idea how or why we will listen to music in the future because I don't have those powers to see ahead. I just know that I personally like the records that I like, as a whole. I like the way one thing proceeds into the next. I remember coming to America for the first time and discovering some of my favourite records were in a different order. Beatles records, for instance, were in a different order because they had come out in a different sequence of releases and tracks had been added to albums and consequently tracks dropped off. And I found it upsetting to listen to them because they didn't go as I knew them, you know. That's obviously changed radically now, and of course, like anybody else, if I hear, somebody tells me, you've got to hear this thing, as you say, it's two clicks away to whatever it is, iTunes, YouTube. I mean, I like YouTube because it has that feeling of the way people used to say, have you heard this, and it would be something incredibly hard to find and somebody would play you a 45 they'd brought from overseas and it would be something that you couldn't hear anywhere else. But, you know, somebody's kept a battered old kinescope of Cliff Brown and they're sharing it with you and nobody who actually owns that stuff is going to take the time to make it available to you in any way that you could see it legitimately, so I don't feel there's any immorality about seeing that because that brief moment of him on film is the only record of him playing, the only visual record of him playing the trumpet, you know, and that's great that somebody kept it and kept it close to their heart all that time until the medium by which we could all share in it.

Because there's just so much stuff today the commodity that there is less of is their time and their attention to enjoy something. And I'm just interested in how that works for you?

But, that might be, I hate to say this, but there is an element to your publication, you know, I've read, obviously I've seen your column and everything and there is a sort of oldie, I say this with the greatest of respect, sort of posture to some of the commentary, that it's kind of this impatience with the modern world, that things are not valued the way they were in the good old days and to some degree I kind of agree that when we had less records you valued that one thing, you knew everything about that record. I could, at one point, recite the print information, you know, the printing information on a vinyl record. But recently I was in the studio producing a band and they were, you know, just some kids, you know, and they know every sort of music that you could wish to - and that can only be because there's every sort of legal/illegal instant source and the reference points are so much richer, so you have to be careful that you don't trick yourself into thinking that the old ways were the best because, simply because it's an unfamiliar territory. I just don't believe in this, you know, I don't believe in entitlement to anything being other than the way it is. I mean, I don't think anything that we admire was made the way it is because the artist, and for that matter even the record companies, in certain cases, were craven, that they were necessarily leaning into the expectations of the audience. In fact, it was almost always about springing surprises, and even sometimes confounding people's expectations. So the fact that you can do that better informed by a breadth of possibilities seems to me to be quite healthy. And you'll find a record where you go, wow, I never would have imagined that reference to this thing being put alongside that thing, but these people have obviously encountered those musics. I think if you go to the one or two record shops of value that still exist, like Amoeba, where I was, they have one in Los Angeles and they have one in San Francisco, there is a sort of genuine curiosity about music. There's also a desire on the part of the owners to kind of try and guide people, not just for purely reasons of commerce, but trying to guide people with their own enthusiasms for really obscure records, just go, you've got to check this one out, or, if you like that thing, you might just like this. I've had people come up to me and go, thank you for turning me onto George Jones. And I'm thinking well, goodness me, if me just recording Good Year For The Roses, whether or not it was a good record or not, had anybody buy a George Jones record, then my work here is done. Because somebody did it for me, you know what I'm saying. I mean, I didn't know who Smokey Robinson was before the Beatles did You've Really Got a Hold on Me. I mean, when I first heard him, and I went, oh, that's that guy that wrote that song, you know. And so on and so forth. And that chain reaction of it is the magical discovery, but I don't necessarily think that it's worse now.

No, I don't think it is, but I think it's our attention is the difficult thing to come up with.

I do have culls now and again, with collections. When I left Europe and came to live in America initially, about six years ago, I took two record collections, put one in storage in London and brought another one to New York, of things that really I played a lot and that was a lot of records, you know. You know, a shelf full, you know, a wall full of records, a wall in an apartment, full of records. And left in permanent storage and I'm now donating them, 10,000 CDs. You can donate them to libraries so that they can be used, the students can use them. Because a lot of them were classical things I'd been interested in and jazz records that were important, like everything by one artist, where actually, as you say, there was only that record that I played regularly.

10,000 and they only even started making them in '84, you know.

Yeah. So did you get a sense of relief when you got rid of them?

I thought, I know that sooner or later they'll be back, you know, I'll probably end up getting some of them again because my interest will be revived and I'll reach for it and I'll go, oh, you know what, I decided I didn't need that after all, you know. Or you just get that, and the ability to download the thing at a click on digital, even though in inferior - I mean, if we all agree now that vinyl sounds better than CD, MP3 sounds worse than CD, in most cases, I mean, it does, it just sounds worse. So, you know, weirdly enough, all of the flexibility, portability and instant access is traded for much inferior quality. And I believe that's going to change in the next couple of years. What may change what you're saying is I think people will - there has been a 30% increase in vinyl sales over the last year, that's not to say that the old ways are coming back, but I think that what you may see is people demanding better quality. Just like high definition television. But surely, if you could have portability and instant access and it sounds as good as the best thing as you ever experienced, why would you not want that? The only reason you wouldn't want it is because it takes slightly longer to download it. But if the speed of the lines gets greater then you could have MP4 or better digital files that actually allow, that are high resolution, and actually give you a richer picture, instead of this heavily compressed thing that you can have in seconds. That's my only observation about the technical side.

It's not so much whether, you know, our mind space can be crowded, as whether we have the powers of concentration. I mean, to be perfectly honest, an awful lot of mainstream record releases don't sound as if they were ever intended to be listened to for more than the week that they're going to be a hit or the two weeks they're going to be a hit, just like a lot of novelty records in the sixties. Bubblegum records that were maddening and you couldn't get them out your head and then you wanted them out of your head and usually, by the time you reached that point of wanting them out of your head, another record came along to replace it with being that annoying record that you couldn't get out of your head. And so it was fine. Meanwhile there was another record that was in your heart or in your soul that you listened to alone or with somebody you cared about, that's my argument about the different ways of listening, I mean, there's social music and private music.

Go on.

Well, there just is, isn't there? There's two types of music. I mean, there's social music which is church music, dance music, theatre music and I suppose all music in live performance becomes social music because one of the great things about it is you're sharing the experience of listening to it in the company of other people, with which you feel some compatibility or some, you know, there's something to being in a crowd where even the most delicate thing is expressed or the most thrilling, high energy thing is expressed and you're all doing something stupid with your body, you know. I mean, I think that's wonderful. Then there's the record you listen to in the dark. And that can be a loud record too, you know. It doesn't have to just be intimate music. But I think both those things are wonderful. It's just when one thinks about the discouragement to actually go ahead because the business of music is so, thought to be in the doldrums. The other element, the social music thing becomes dominant, that's what you said right at the beginning of the conversation about live performance. But it's every kind of live performance is thriving. It's not just big blockbuster shows that are selling. People will go and see, you know, ten people in a room will go and see somebody with a guitar. And long may that be the case because that's been going on thousands of years. The only thing that was added in the last 100 or so years is electricity.

To completely change the subject, are drummers special people?

I think drummers would tell you, yes, they are. Absolutely they are. I don't know whether drummers especially are, but I think in terms of what makes bands great, when bands change their drummer, it seems to change the character of them. If you think about The Who, you know, there is nobody that played the drums like Keith Moon and it would be really a difficult thing to go and have somebody imitate his style in an attempt to make that band sound the way their record sounded. So every attempt to fill his chair has been about another drummer playing the same songs with a different approach, which is quite tough to do, I think. Now, with an Al Jackson Jr. it's more about a groove than spectacular fills. I mean, I saw Booker T & the MGs with Jim Keltner on drums, now there isn't a better drummer on the face of the earth, but it was a different animal with Jim playing, so you couldn't say it sounded like Booker T & the MGs as much as those records do, you know, because that was those four people, yeah, why would it sound the same. Jazz musicians, on the other hand, you know, they've often thrived on those changes, look at Miles Davis, look how many people he played with in his career and how many different shifts of mood and emphasis and artistry he achieved, just through changes of personnel and never stayed with anything very long and certainly sometimes moved on before people were done with him sounding like that.

I was listening to this version of Don't Throw Your Love Away that you've done with Amsterdam from the Liverpool Number Ones album...

Oh yeah? You're ahead of me because I haven't heard it. They haven't sent me a copy yet. It's a long way from Liverpool to Vancouver, I guess.

Why did you choose that?

I didn't want to do one of The Beatles songs on there because I thought it would be too tough to do and I just thought it was a good song. I thought it was a good song. And my pals in Amsterdam did the backing track and I sang it and, you know... We weren't able to get together to do it because we were other sides of the world, so it was a slightly different sort of thing, but they created such a good picture, I just tried to fit in with Ian Prowse's voice on it, you know. But, like I say, I haven't heard it so I don't know how it turned out. Does it sound all right?

Well, it's very good. I've always loved that song. Who wrote that song?

I mean, afterwards I heard that nobody had done Needles and Pins and I might have wanted to do that one. I thought about doing Little Children by Billy J. Kramer, at one point, but I thought it might sound a bit creepy coming from a guy of my age.

You've signed your back catalogue to Universal, is that right? And I think the quote I read was they announced they would "mine it" for ring tones, digital box sets and more.

Let's hope so. That's their problem, you know. I would have thought by now that a lot of people had these records that wanted them, but there's always those, as we were talking about, people that have become hip to somebody later in their story, they want to go back and check out what they did before. And, I mean, my guess is that most of those sort of people probably get their records, if not, you know, over the internet illegally, then certainly through iTunes, probably not going into a record shop to buy them. I think all of these companies have got a really hard job to make their business go round. They've got way too big and it isn't my responsibility to tell them how to do it. I personally think that they're going about some of the elements of it the wrong way, but they're their own bosses, they're not my bosses, you know, and I don't work for them, I just licensed it in good faith and I think that they've made their records rather too expensive. They made some very beautiful packages on, they did a beautiful looking edition of My Aim Is True on the 30th anniversary and they had one of This Year's Model, but they're so frighteningly expensive, I think that they have been short-sighted. And it's something that happens with businesses. It's like airlines, you know, they're really struggling, so they make the experience of being on an aeroplane as unpleasant as possible so you never, ever want to get on one again and then they wonder why they go out of business. And the record business, right now, is in the kind of freefall. It's at that moment where every decision that they're making, and most disappointingly, about their own staff. There's a very cynical move, across all record companies, to fire all the people of competence with long service contracts because it's too expensive to keep them under their employment, which leaves them with a bunch of very inexperienced people of less competence, who are expected to do twice as much work, which means they're probably about an eighth as efficient as they were six months ago. And their sales figures reflect this, I think. And I'm not saying that because I'm upset about their sales of my records, I couldn't care less. That's not how I make my living. I make my living by playing music live. So people think that you do these deals to make a lot of money, but those records are not going to sell at those prices and they need to rethink the way they're doing it, but I can't persuade them to do so because they have their own agenda and, as I say, they're busy cost cutting. And it's not just the company that I was signed to, it's every company. They're in a really desperate fight to stay with their model, they need to forget about the model and start again, because I know that's what I've done.

Go on, when did you change your model?

I would record and then tour. I just tour now. If I record again it will be a different way of doing it. And not the actual making of the music, because that can only be the same, you go in a room and you play something and it gets captured on tape or whatever format you try to record it on. But I just don't think you can go on with this old way of doing things. "OK, it's three months till the record's release, okay, we've got to do all these things." Did you see that interview with Paul McCartney where he said, they always say go to Cologne and do these interviews, they always say that, regardless, you know? I thought that was pretty funny, after 40 years they were still saying the same thing to him. It made me feel a lot better about what had been said to me, I have to tell you, you know. Because I've been on that plane to Cologne a lot of times, and you know what, I ain't going anymore. Because I can go there under my own steam and it will be about why I want to be there, you know, which is to play, not to go and talk about it. I mean, I'm not degrading what we're doing right now, but with a few noble exceptions, there's not an awful lot to be told on those junkets, you know. And you have to go on this TV show and then it's got to be this, and this has got to go here because this goes there, and it's all part of some template that they've got, you know, people that have been in the job five minutes. Meanwhile music, everything goes on like at the speed it goes on and right now I have a lot of reasons to be somewhere else, not least of all being a father again makes me want to have the pace of my life be different, not slower, heaven knows not slower, much, much faster, you know. But I want my time to be mine, or ours, and then when I work I want it to be on my terms. And I really don't see any reason why it shouldn't be. And it has nothing to do with record releases now, if it ever did. I'm astounded, the one year I was on Stiff, I was astounded when we sold 1,000 records in a day because I thought we could have only possibly, in my wildest imaginings, have sold that many in a week. And then, you know, a year later we sold this many or that many and so it went on. And then it changes again and you should be prepared to adapt and never be afraid to change your mind.

So at the moment you don't have a plan to make a band record or rock record or whatever, in the next two years or something like that, or you might do or you might not?

You know what, I might make five records, I might go back to that plan. You know, but if I do make five records, I don't want to be told we can't put them out because that isn't what we can do. Because, you know, if you can do it they should be able to do it. So if they can't deal with it then they're clearly the wrong people. But, you know, they've issued something like 60 discs with my name on it have come out since the turn of the millennium. There's a lot to choose from. You know, well I'd say, let the blood soak into ground for a while, you know.

Right. I was interested, you did those reissues, and they're doing them again, and you've got huge numbers of B sides and live recordings and all this kind of stuff, do you have somebody who curates your stuff, do you have somebody who looks after it all?

I do have some people helping me, but really, I know where the bodies are buried, you know, and really, without my help I really don't think anybody would know or would be that interested. I had a lot of cassettes in drawers and stuff. When we put out the reissue of Almost Blue, I was the only one that remembered that I'd recorded singing harmony with Johnny Cash in 1979 in Nick Lowe's basement. And I was the only one who had a copy of it and even the House of Cash didn't know it existed. And when John Carter Cash was kind enough to, and my friend Steve Berkowitz from Legacy, to sort out the reel of tape that had Without Love on it which is actually part of the Johnny Cash Essential Collection, so it actually made the top 30 of Johnny Cash releases that Columbia put out. On the very same session was the song I sang with John on, I think it's, next year, it'll be 30 years. But I have to say, not without reason, you know, it wasn't a great record, but it was pretty great to put the reel of tape up and push the fader up and have John's voice come out, like booming out the speakers. That was unbelievable.

Do you think the music business is full of fragments like that that are on cassettes and tapes and whatever in people's drawers?

EC I've got boxes full of the songs of my own, so I can only imagine other people have got them as well, but whether they're interesting, I mean, I really don't know. I mean, there's a particularly disposition of person who wants to hear every last piece by anybody they really care about and then sometimes there's a reason why they're called outtakes, you know. I remember buying a Billie Holiday set, you know, I got in Japan, that had every take that she had ever done for Columbia, but they were all one after another, so you've got The Man I Love and then you've got the three attempts to make The Man I Love. But they weren't really that much different, you know, there was usually just, like she fluffed a lyric or somebody came in at the wrong point. They weren't like a really different interpretation. Sometimes a demo is interesting because the song is taken off somewhere and maybe, in some cases, ruined. And I've done it myself, you know, I've gone back to the demo of a song and thought, well, I really let that one get away because of whatever I did to it in the process of recording. And there's sometimes that you can sing the song one way and then end up recording it another and both versions are legitimate, they're both valid interpretations of the song, whether or not one is better than the other is just a matter of your taste. And that's the same with a lot of artists I like, the Dylan sets that have come out and Neil Young and people like that who, you know... And that fantastic box they did on Tom Waits, you know, that Anti put out. Stuff like that I find interesting, but the people that you're talking about are interesting artists, so you're going to be intrigued by their attempts to do the song in a different way. But not every last note played by some people, that's just not that brilliant. I mean, I'm much more, you know, everybody's got a couple of, a handful of titles that they can say, you know, I bet you never heard this one, it's a knockout, you know, whether it's an obscure Motown record or some weird garage band record. And there's always somebody somewhere putting a compilation of that together and I think that's what makes, you know, the big archive of music, however it's stored, however it's delivered, something of richness, it makes life interesting. I mean, I went into that record store I told you about, when I was in Los Angeles last week, and you'd think all the records I've got and I still bought $500 worth of records in about 20 minutes.

What did you buy?

All sorts of things, you know, some things that I didn't know. I bought Tim Hardin's second record on vinyl, you know. Just because I wanted it because I know it's a really beautiful sounding record and I thought it would be really nice to have a vinyl copy again, I don't think I even had one originally. And then some weird sort of psychedelic band and, you know, some record from Guinea or, you know, a gypsy band from Romania, you know, they've got all sorts in there, so you just... Anyway, I just decided, okay, I'm going to just buy a few things, I'm going to just let my curiosity get the better of me for this 20 minutes and just see, have a shopping cart. I was walking around with a pal of mine and he said, oh, you might like that, and I did the same thing and the next thing we knew we both had a big stack of records. It was just, it was a gas, you forget that that's fun. You go in most of those stores that exist, those chain stores, it's like a bloody amusement arcade. It isn't very conducive to that way of thinking, you know. There was just one record playing in the shop and it was, I forget what I was now, you know, The Kinks, I think it was. And then five minutes later it was something else, you know, but it was something else interesting. I mean, that's, unfortunately, again, it does sound like a sentimental sort of view of it, when it used to be better. Well, it still is good, you just have to go looking for it, you know. There's somebody somewhere that's running a shop that's saying, you should hear this, it's a local band or it's a band from the past or it's a band from the future. And it's the band from the future that ultimately is going to be the difference between it all being totally miserable in years to come. I want to be surprised, you know, I don't want to say, oh, there's never going to be another record the makes me, that thrills me.

You've been doing this for 30 years now. What's people's biggest, what do you think is people's greatest misconception about show business, rock and roll?

Well, I think it's what's going on behind the green door. I think, the idea that there is inherently something glamorous about the life. Of course there are moments that are startling when you encounter people that you've admired and you suddenly can talk to them as one human to another. Some of the people that I've known or have got to know or have even become friends with, it surprised me that I was once in a room listening to their voice on a record. So that's the most surprising thing for me. In some ways, in a lot of ways it's a job, you know. But it's a job with a huge amount of freedom. I don't get up when anybody else has to get up. That's really all I ever wanted to do in this business, I didn't really want anything else from it. And, do you know what, I get up really early and always have done really.

As they always used to say at the press conference, you know, do you have any message to your fans in Britain?

[laughter] I don't know, I don't have a vision of fans, you know, I never did do. I know there's people that like what I do and I know there's people that are impatient with some things I do, but I don't think about like addressing them as a mass. I would try to think of them as individuals, as I hope they would think of me as an individual, with my right to do whatever I want, you know. I mean, I think this thing is about freedom and sometimes about audacity, but not all the time, sometimes it's routine, you know. But I really, no, I don't really have a statement, other than I think it's a really wonderful job, it's better than the job I used to have, and I think assumptions are really, really dangerous, that one thing naturally leads to another. Because in may case it almost certainly never has. You know, one thing has never led to the obvious other. It's almost always led me somewhere that I didn't expect to be and continues to be so. And I think the immediate future is going to be quite surprising. And I'm actually very hopeful. I can't speak to you and not pretend that three months ago, that every broadsheet arts page didn't contain some sort of assassination piece on me. You must have seen a couple of those, you know. I made an offhand remark in an interview about our Glastonbury appearance in 2005 and some sub editor put it in a black box and put it on the website and the next thing there were tabloids, my mother's ringing me up and going, what's this thing about you hate Britain? And then, more bewilderingly, every arts page editorial, you know, the arts page in the sort of broadsheet, had an article about the whys and wherefores of what I'd said, I mean, like five or six articles. It was like extraordinary to me that they would waste so much paper on such a thing, you know. I mean, kind of confirming my suspicion that it is a little, sometimes more than a little bit too much of a hothouse over there, you know. Like you've really got nothing better to worry about than what I said, you know. I think the real truth of it is that there are people that probably have me locked in a box that says 1979, and then also that have me locked in that '82 box, in their memory, you know, and they don't really know or particularly care. Then of course there's the swathes of people that bought She that have no knowledge whatsoever of any other record I made except that one that they danced to at the wedding or something, you know, and they think that's what I do. Or they have some offhand idea I'm some sort of vaguely angry guy from the past that wears specs. And of course, it's entirely their right to have little or no knowledge or opinion or care at all about it. What I think is much less healthy is floating a statue of yourself up the Thames on a barge, do you know what I'm saying, you know? Do you remember that one?

You'll never rule the world with music, you know. You know what's much better for ruling the world is a machine gun, music will never do it for you. You need a big fucking army if you want to rule the world. I just think people, they've taken the wrong tools to do the job when they want to rule the world. I think, you know, obviously in the past there are people that were hugely famous out of music. It's not going to happen that way again. I think it's way better when there's lots of things happening. When I said that the misconception about show business is that that glamorous thing is happening beyond the green door, I like the fact that there's something happening out of sight and out of earshot of both you and me right now, that when we hear it we're going to be thrilled by it. And I don't want to know all about it in advance. And, do you know what, I don't even want to know all about it. I don't want to know all their secrets. I don't care about all their outtakes. I don't care about who they're fucking, I don't care, you know, I just want to hear what they have to say in song. Because that's actually what I paid for, was a ticket to hear them play live or, you know, the price of the record or the disc or MP3 that they made and that's all that I fucking care about. It's that currency, you know. That's all I ever cared about, was the record. I don't need to know all about it. I do know, perhaps more than I should do about some people, somehow I absorbed it all, you know, but I don't actually fucking care. I just care about the music, that's all, it's all I ever think about. If people think it's been about money, they've got to be kidding, you know. You know what Steve Earle said? "Every five years I find a woman who hates me and buy her a house." Well, I won't say that that's been my life, thank goodness, you know, I've lived the life I've lived, but you don't, you make money to live, you know, not to build golden palaces to yourself, that's part of the same megalomania thing. Of course, I think anybody in pop music is entitled to a few moments of megalomania at some time in their career or at least a few distortions of value, I fully own up to those in my dim distant past. But in the long run, it's a life, it's a vocational thing being a musician and I'm, you know, I'm the third in three or four generations of musicians in my family in total, maybe five generations, who knows where those fellas upstairs are headed.

I've got to ask you this, what's it like at your age chasing around after two year-olds?

It's fan-fucking-tastic.

You can bend down to them and all that kind of thing?

Oh, yeah, I'm pretty spry, you know.

And the broken nights and so forth weren't too bad.

Well, I don't sleep anyway, so it makes no difference to me.