Well in terms of commercial success, it’s a loaded the term. The word ‘commercial’ implies mass popularity and huge sales and a financially secure life, and all the rest of it. There are elements of that which would be nice, the financial security for example. However, I don’t have any hankering after what people might think of as pop stardom. It’s perhaps a good job that I don’t because I'm certainly not of an age where that would sit handsomely on my middle-aged person. I tend to be very dismissive of that whole ‘star’ system anyway, always have been to a degree. I don’t like the way that people are set up as tin Gods really, I'm just not comfortable with that sort of approach. At the same time, I would like the music I make to reach a larger audience. Without compromise, that’s the trick. There are degrees of compromise that come in to making things commercially successful. For something to be commercially successful from me, it wouldn’t be the music I want to make.

I’d like to put a band together, I’d like to go out on tour, I’d like to do some of the material from both the Be-Bop period and Red Noise and the eighties solo period, on stage with a band plus some new material. That’s something that I would dearly love to do, the cost of doing that is phenomenal, the cost of moving people around, getting the right kind of people to work with, in terms of musicians and crew. I’m not looking at it in the way that Be-Bop did it, with huge production and presentation. But just to do something that at least isn’t a sort of a pick up band in a pub. Something that’s got a little bit more presentation than that, and just to pay good musicians the wages that they deserve, and all the rest of it, it’s very expensive, and without a major record company to help underwrite those costs, it becomes impossible. The main thing is that, because I don’t have a band sitting there now, I would have to start from scratch. It would be auditioning and learning the stuff and there would be a huge amount of time building the monster to go out on the road. That takes a lot of money, just to pay people to give up their time to rehearse and learn the stuff, and then you have to go out on the road with all the costs on top of that. So it’s almost an impossibility. Sometimes I think well maybe there will be one of these fluke situations, where somebody picks up on one of the pieces of music that I've done in the past, and wants to re-issue it or put it on a movie soundtrack, or whatever it might be, and it brings a wider recognition to the whole picture through one piece. And then there becomes the possibility of raising the funds to do it, as there is some kind of pay back for the people who pay for those things.

Even to do that, even if I had enough mates to get through some numbers, it’s an untried and untested quality, until I put those people together and see what it sounds like. To put those people together means that I've got to give them each pieces of music to learn, they’ve got to go away and learn it. It will mean me giving up my time, stopping recording, stopping making my videos, doing diaries and anything else, and just think, right now we’re going to learn some old songs, some new songs, then sit around and see what happens. I could maybe spend two months testing people out in a band, only to find out at the end, that it’s not good enough. There’s that element of risk and I worry about it. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a good enough reason not to do it, but it’s a consideration. To do that , then trail through to Leeds just to do a couple of gigs, and with a band that’s maybe okay, but not great. I don’t know whether it’ll maybe damage the whole thing in some way. I've thought about it, I’m still open to it, and I still think there’s a possibility of it working out.

It would be different if I could think, here’s a list of players, that I absolutely know are going to be so good. Then work it out and say, "this is going to cost £500 a week each", or whatever it is, to do rehearsals, and so much for gigs. At least then I would know that these are experienced guys, they’ve toured a lot, they’ve been with this band or that band, they’re going to be able to get to grips with this stuff really quickly. I’m not going to have to knock it into shape when we go into rehearsals, all I'm going to have to worry about is myself, because these guys are going to have it so tight and so well thought through. That’s more encouraging if you can do that, it means you’ve got a very, very strong foundation, and if I fall, it might not be so bad. But with people with less experience, then the weight comes back on my shoulders, to watch everybody, every minute of the day. It becomes an enormous task for me, it’s not like I've been out playing either. To get my own playing, to refresh my memory, especially of the old Be-Bop Deluxe numbers, and re-learn them to do justice to them, means that I've got to stop everything I'm doing and go back to the roots again. So it’s tricky, there’s all kinds of excuses I can make why it doesn’t happen. The main one is financial, and always will be, until I can bankroll the thing properly. It’s one thing to go out with a bunch of friends, and do a gig under another name, in a little pub, sort of without any focus on it, just for fun. That’s something that maybe wouldn’t be too difficult to do. But stick Be-Bop Deluxe’s name, or my name, or reference any of those things, then people start to expect something, so the workload suddenly increases. You’ve a lot more to think about to do it right.

Well the other thing that I can do, which I'm planning on doing, hopefully not too far into next year, is similar to the things I've done at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the South Bank in London, and the Wakefield Arts Festival, and the Notre Dame church in London. A man and his guitar and tapes. My friend Steve is quite a good keyboard player, he said he would be prepared to come along and improvise on things with me, so it wouldn’t be just me up on the stage, improvising on one instrument all night long. That kind of thing would give me the opportunity for using video, I've used that kind of thing in the past, as you know. But now that I've got my own video making equipment and I can actually put things together here, I can really do something that’s far more personal. I had other people collaborating on the ones I did before, but I could do something this time that could be a really personal vision, and just have those projected behind me all the time.

It’s stressful doing one of those things on your own, because unless there’s a film there, then I'm the only point of focus and it tends to be pretty much tied around instrumental music anyway. So it’s not like you’re watching somebody singing or listening to words. It’s pretty monochrome all the way through, because it’s just a man and his guitar and some tapes, by bringing the visuals in, that helps, and by bringing in at least one person, that helps me tremendously as well.

So that is quite a definite possibility for the beginning of the year. I'm going to try and do this band video thing. I think the secret of the band thing, will be this: - when I record the next album, when the new equipment does finally get installed, and I get to know how to use it, then that will give me an indication, depending on how the album goes, as to what will be the next step. I'm hoping to start the new album, thinking about how this material will be played if it was played live, and not allow it to get too studio orientated. So it might be something quite simple and quite primitive, and quite direct in comparison to the past things. If it works out that way, then the band thing might be more practical, as there would be less needed to reproduce the material. Although you still have a problem when you get to the Be-Bop Deluxe stuff, and all the other stuff I've done as well, particularly the studio orientated material.

Oh, I had lots of great times in America; it’s strange looking back, because I think I went to America with a lot of preconceptions, as most English people do when they go for the first time. There was the fantasy America that I’d been exposed to, particularly movies from the fifties, even forties. That gives you a certain expectation, about what American life is going to be like, and in fact a lot of that was pretty accurate, particularly in visual terms, things were very much like I expected, from the fantasy America I had been seeing.

But what struck me the first time was that it was a foreign country. That despite the fact that we share the same common language, and we’re both exposed to each other’s cultures, I know many Americans are very aware of British culture, that there is fundamentally a different thing at work, a different outlook. Also because I was traveling in America, in the circus that is a rock and roll tour, with all the attendant people that are around you, crew and band, journalists and record company people, managers, agents and you arrive at a place, and you’re taken straight to a radio station to do an interview, then to another for another interview, then back to the hotel. A quick change and on to the concert, and away you go. It’s not the best way to get to grips with what any place is about, because you're living in a kind of a sealed bubble. And that bubble isn’t very pleasant sometimes. I particularly found it difficult dealing with the superficial business elements that you encounter.

My initial impressions after being there a while were modified and it ended up with me writing the ‘Modern Music’ suite, with things like ‘Dance Of The Uncle Sam Humanoids,’ which actually has a parody of a particular record company staff member, who was assigned to us in certain parts of America, to be our ‘man on the spot’. He really ended up being subject of a lot of jokes from the band, because he wasn’t as hip as he might have been. But that produced that whole Modern Music suite, I tried to capture that, like ‘Honeymoon On Mars,’ it was like going to another planet, but a cartoon planet.

Now my feelings of America are much more mature, I've got lots of friends in America and I'm lucky enough to have fans in America as well. There is a lot out there to be envied, although I'm concerned about their new president. There’s an optimism in American people that is only balanced by the amount of cynicism in English people I think. It’s a much more optimistic atmosphere for anybody trying to achieve something. In England there seems to be a grey wall of doom against everything you do, if it’s going to be anything special, or different.

We toured with lots of different bands in America, but we very quickly established places where we were strong enough in our own right, to be able to headline big venues. Initially we were put on with all kinds of people. Some of the worst things were supporting people like Ted Nugent and Blue Oyster Cult, who seemed to draw a crowd that were basically Neanderthals. Or so it seemed at the time. And sometimes we were with bands that were a little bit more creative, we toured with a band called the Tubes, and with Alice Cooper at one time as well. Both those bands had a very visual stage show with a lot of effects and things, and it was a little bit more creative and imaginative, not just a straight ahead gothic rock thing.

We toured with some far more credible people, one was Patti Smith, sometimes she headlined, sometimes we headlined. We toured with Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, who supported us. And Iggy Pop we did gigs with as well, I think we swapped with him in terms of headlining as well. We also toured with English bands out there, we did some gigs with Thin Lizzy. Really the majority of the time we did our own gigs, we went out there doing smaller places originally, but doing a large gig as support to a very established band, then the next tour, we’d probably be able to do the big place on our own. So gradually we expanded it so we weren’t actually supporting much at all towards the end.

As far as the Van Morrison thing goes, Kate was in the band at that time, the guitar player had left or been sacked, I don’t know what had happened. And she called me up and said would I like to go down to have a play with the band, with a view to possibly going on the road with them. I thought about it, and at the time, things were quite difficult for me financially. It was in that dark few years with the divorce and the Mark Rye case going on simultaneously. Having to sell the occasional guitar to survive, so the idea of a regular wage coming in from this gig, was something that would have been very useful. But I just couldn’t see me being the right person for the job. I'm not very good at being a full time back up person, I'm okay doing the occasional session for other people, and I think I'm okay with collaborating with other people, certainly people I have a common musical interest with. People like Harold, the Channel Light Vessel people, David Sylvian and so on. As I get older, there seems to be less and less time available to me to do the kind of thing I really need to do, which is to make a personal statement. And it would have been a distraction really, to get into somebody else’s musical mindset. So I passed on it basically.

It’s pretty easy for me to say. There’s been a lot of collaborations. The one that has been the most special and rewarding for me, was when I did the album with Harold in New Orleans. Plus we’ve done some live work together, we’ve toured over in Japan and a couple of quiet concerts over here. The Harold thing was great for so many reasons, I’ve been a fan of his music for a long time anyway, and we did actually get to know each other just as people before we worked together. We met through a mutual acquaintance and got on really well. Then Harold invited me over to work on his album ‘By The Dawn’s Early Light’, and we recorded in Daniel Lanois’s old studio, in the old part of New Orleans, the French quarter. It was in a beautiful Gothic mansion, which really wasn’t a studio at all; the recording equipment was just laid out in the big hall of this mansion. Anybody who’s heard the record will know the group comprised of harp, pedal steel guitar, piano, keyboards, viola and guitar. We played ninety percent of the stuff, maybe more, live. Then just a few embellishments were added afterwards.

The combination of this amazing recording environment, which despite it not being a purpose built studio, was perhaps the best studio I’ve ever been in, as regards pulling out something musically from the people in there. So with that and it’s location in the French quarter of New Orleans, with all its history and its musical history, working with somebody of Harold’s calibre, plus the group itself, which I thought was a marvelous combination of instruments and people… It was a complete joy. I went into the thing feeling very stressed and nervous, because I hadn’t worked with Harold before. I knew that he’d written everything for the rest of the members of the band, he knew I was self-taught and that I don’t read or write music. I have no academic musical training at all. So basically, he just allowed me to improvise and do anything I wanted. That took some of the pressure off, but it also added an extra amount of responsibility. I had to make sure that whatever I contributed, lived up to Harold’s composition. I hope Harold feels that I was on the right track there. So it was a great learning experience, a nice group community experience, and Harold and I became even closer friends after that, we’ve kept in touch ever since. We have a lot of respect for each other’s work, so I’ll put that as the number one thing.

Oh yeah, we’ve recently, earlier this year [2000], done some work in Hull together. A friend of mine called Steve Cobby, who has, not a group, but a project called ‘Fila Brazilia.’ We went out there, Harold and I, for a couple of days earlier this year, and just improvised over some recordings Harold had brought over, some DAT tapes of some piano pieces he had done. In fact only this week, we’ve got some CDR’s of some mixes from that. I’ve had an e-mail this morning from Harold commenting on it. So they may see the light of day at some stage. But I have a different kind of collaboration in mind. If we can get the time to do it, and Harold’s willing, I’d like to really work intensely on something that maybe is quite radical for the both of us, take it somewhere else.