I am a master of disguise as you well know...

The album is called 'Horoscope' in its first phase. There were two phase in the recording - they were interrupted by the 'Taxi' record which took up to a year in the middle of it all - which was a very welcome break for me, it was very good for me to take a pause. When I came back to 'Horoscope' it was great because it was all very clear what to do to it, and the writer's block that I seemed to have developed had disappeared - thank God - and it worked in a sort of easy flow. Sometimes I think you've got to go through a pain barrier, sometimes great things come out of it you know. One thing that we'd perfected during the making of the 'Taxi' record was the rhythm section we were working with which we then used on the 'Horoscope' tapes and changed a lot of the songs that I'd been working on at that time. I also wrote these new songs - one of them was 'Mamouna' : it seemed such a resonant piece I thought that would be a much better title for the album - it had changed so much it was now a different record. So the curse of 'Horoscope' was no more! And Mamouna was a kind of girl's name - one of those names that 'sixties flower children when they'd done their Moroccan thing called their own children. It's a very nice name : I asked an Arab friend of mine if it actually meant anything and she said the rough translation is good luck - so I thought that's a wonderful title for the album, you know?

I used to write a song at the piano ...

- music and words - then take it to the studio - that was right in the early days. As the years have gone by I've more and more been using the studio as an instrument, letting a song develop over quite a long period of time as an instrumental piece - sometimes tempted to leave it as an instrumental - but then invariably I'd find something I could sing or some sort of melody I wanted to do with the voice. But the more developed and more complex it is instrumentally, the harder it seems to be to find words that fit, because as soon as you start using words you're particularising feelings and sensations much more than music which is generally much more abstract - so you sometimes get this conflict and it can be very hard to resolve. When you get it right sometimes really good things happen and I've just learnt to persevere and work at it until I think it's the right thing - so it's not the traditional way, which is why doing the 'Taxi' record was so helpful to me - because that was done in a more traditional way. Obviously the song is there already written - for instance 'Spell On You', I would sing that, the master vocal, on the first day, as I was playing the piano part, so you virtually had the song there and all you had to do was work around that basic core. When I'm working on my own songs it tends to be the opposite way round where the music is first and the words come later so it's quite, quite unusual : I've been working that way for some albums now and maybe I've done enough of that. In the future, especially as I've got my own small studio, it's 24-track analog, I'll be getting back to a more traditional way of working again - 'cause that will now seem like a fresh change to me - and it's good to keep ringing the changes, I think, between the way you work, the people you work with, and the material.

But the music always comes very very easily....

The lyrics I always find a bit of a problem and I think that's the burden of the English or European literary tradition. The trouble with going to college is that you become literary-aware - when you find it's time for you to write something you get very nervous about it, self-conscious even, and very very critical about it, whereas with the music it's a much freer thing ... that's the part of it I really enjoy, doing the melodies - that's the thing I feel I'm best at really. And arrangements are important to me. I like structuring :  a lot if it's surprising, over the five-year period. There's very inspirational, intuitive playing by people - quite often it's a first-take thing. A lot of the time was spent structuring it and getting things to balance with each other and bounce off each other. It's a fascinating process ... I love making records.

As I've got more involved in ...

the recording process over the years so I've come to layer the music in quite a deep way which means that sometimes it takes a long time for a listener to make it out, what's there, and even people in the record company have told me that it takes them several listens before it starts to mean something to them, and once it does ... then they're hooked! But for me it's strange because I've lived with it for such a long time it all sounds very basic and straightforward - it's peculiar, that. I like the way that - I think - the record can be played quietly in the background as an ambient sort of record - I often use music like that, in the background, opera and stuff. You can also get lost in it as well if you want to ...  it's dual - purpose!

I've always liked atmospheric textures in music where you can lose yourself in those spacey sounds.

At the same time I like to have a rhythmic kind of groove underneath, which is very important. This time there's probably a stronger kind of undercurrent rhythmically than in some of the recent records - certainly a more organic rhythm - I try and get the right balance between machine-time and human-time. This time it's humans playing in very good time so it's hopefully the best of both worlds for me.

I often think that each song is its own picture with different colours, different structure and textures, hopefully different feelings. At the end of the day you hope they'll all link up in a nice way and relate to each other too, but you've got to make each song have its own integrity and try to be its own piece that can stand up on its own. I try and give all the songs equal billing - very rarely would I do an album where there was a stand-out song, which sometimes makes it very difficult for the record company and radio, to find a song that's 'radio-friendly' as it were - I'm not really so good at doing that. But I think that as a 45 minute piece of music - as an album - I'm very pleased with it.

The great thing about this album for me was finally getting a team in place so that I could be the artist again - I'd been playing the producer for too long, I think, which is fine when it comes to the ideas and arrangements but when it stopped me from singing it was obviously a bit of a problem. So I started working with Robin Trower who was really good at pressuring me to go out and sing and push myself forward on the project ... In the past, on group records, it was a different kind of working dynamic - in the competitive situation like that you tend to put yourself forward much more. It's your own album you tend to be a little bit more laid-back about it. So this time I pushed myself forward and played a lot more, so it sounds a lot more like me again - which I'm very happy about!

It was very exciting for me to work with Brian Eno again,...

because it was twenty years since we'd been in the studio and we'd only ever done two albums together, of course, so there was still a lot more to do, we felt - and still feel. We got on so well, and it was such a fruitful enterprise - he would always find something interesting to add to what was a nearly complete piece. One of the songs we originated together - 'Wildcat Days': we'd been working on these things and Brian said shouldn't we try and do something from scratch - I said good idea - it's the first song we've ever written together.

The other guys from Roxy...

I was interested to see what it would be like to work with Phil Manzanera again because I've been collecting guitarists over the years, working with lots of different guitar players. Phil was only in for an afternoon so there's only a little bit of him on the album. But Andy Mackay I'd worked with on 'Taxi' so I see quite a bit of Andy - and that worked out OK too.

All three of them actually play on 'Wildcat Days' - that's the nearest you could get to a Roxy Music reunion at the moment! People often ask me if I'd like to reform the group and having been away from it for such a long time it does intrigue me as well. Whether it will happen in the near future I'm not sure because I have next year's album pretty much sorted out in my head. But anything could change, and I've given up predicting what I'm going to do in the future.

It was very nostalgic, seeing Eno, an emotional experience really. I felt that he hadn't changed at all, and I hope the same with me. It really felt very much as if it was yesterday that we worked together - so twenty years just disappeared in a flash which was quite extraordinary. I'd never really experienced that before ... I've found lately that I've been meeting up with a lot of people from my past - in experiences like that. Strange how things go in circles.

I was asked the other day if I saw myself as a perfectionist or an inquiring soul who doesn't know what he's looking for. Oh, a bit of both, probably, I said. I don't love word 'perfectionist" because it always implies some kind of sterility. It's a hopeless quest anyway, because nothing is ever perfect, you know - I'd never dream that any finished record of mine is that. It just reaches a point where you think well, that'll do, that's right - I'm quite happy for that to go out, to hear that in five years time and not be upset by it and think wow, I didn't spend enough time on it. In the past sometimes I have let things go through which weren't quite ready, I've rushed songs. The great time to be aware of that is when you're listening to your old catalogue looking for songs to play on tour: it's always the ones where you spent that bit of extra time and, say, got the lyric right - they're the ones you still want to keep playing on stage.

When I'd finished the 'For Your Pleasure' Album...

in 1973 I just had this idea for a one-off album of songs by other people - just as a break for my own writing - maybe some different musicians as well: different material and different players. It was very enjoyable to make something so fast and without so much of the angst that I experience when I'm doing my own songs. And I was very successful commercially. So I did some more things like that in the 'seventies and found it was a very good break from my own writing and took away some of the pressure from my own writing as well. 'Taxi' last year was a very similar situation. I wish I'd done more albums like it in the 'eighties in fact, especially after 'Avalon', which was so successful artistically and commercially that it was a very hard record to follow - it might have been a good idea to continue that formula of doing these interpretive records. I certainly intend to do that in the future, much more. It's great: since the song is already written you can sing it from day one - it's so different from the way I work on my own songs. It's also a challenge to see if you can make the song your own - bring some new twist to the arrangement or melody, or sing it in a slightly different way from the original. The first music I listened to was jazz: frequently Charlie Parker, say, would be doing an old standard which had been done a million times before by other artists - but he'd create something new out of it, using that song as a springboard for his own inventiveness, and I've tried to apply that sort of principle when I'm doing a song written by someone else. On the 'Taxi' album there were two or three I felt I'd brought something new to - to where I felt I was collaborating with the song writer, saying ... well what if we changed the melody to this? There's always a new way of doing something. I usually just play the song many times until I find my own way into it - I might find an alternative harmony or something. It still has the mood of the song but it's different. It's fascinating. One of the interesting song for me on 'Taxi' was 'Just One Look', because the original version by Doris Troy was great, very vivacious. To me, I interpreted it in a much sadder way, like a blues song, very haunting - by far my favorite on that album.

What I'd love to do is an album of really old songs -

like 'These Foolish Things', - from a period when song writing and record making were two very different activities. Now they tend to be the same thing. A lot of records are producers' records rather than songwriters' records. It's very hard to get the balance right, I guess, when you want something to feel as if it's contemporary but you do want it to sound good in five or ten years' time.

It's significant that Sinatra never wrote a song, as far as I'm aware - he's strictly an interpretive artist. I'm too interested in song writing and record making to pursue that ... Singing is really only a small part of what I do - but I am looking forward to going out on tour and concentrating on that side of my life again. I'll have to start practising my scales.

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