So how's life treating you at this moment in time?
Generally, pretty damn good. I've got a bit of free time at the moment so I've been writing some new songs. It'll end in about three days as I'll be going on a twelve date acoustic tour, visiting the likes of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, then we'll return to do a gig at the Aquarium in London.

Ah, that's the place with the pool in it?
Yeah, who knows we may go for a little swim afterwards.

So apart from your own gigs whose gigs have you attended recently?
There was this girl from New Zealand, she may have been Japanese her name was "Bic" and she was playing guitar and everyone just shut up as soon as she started playing. It was very loud and she played for about fifteen minutes and it was like "all hail". I quite like Ether, we did a little tour with them and I went to see P.J. Harvey about a year ago which was my favourite gig ever. So I have to say that. She did a choreographed music dance. It was really good.

And were you dancing?
No. I also went to see some work recently of Francis Bacon, that was very interesting.

How important is technology to your work?
It didn't start off being very important, but it opens up so many different levels that you can go to. Even though the band is great to have, I love being in a studio and messing around and I like getting involved in the web page, designing the logo going up on it and the colour scheme. I've also done my fair bit of sampling. It's important though not to get side-tracked from the whole point of just writing a song. Sometimes I get carried away with some of the more technical things in the studio and it shows on my B-sides a lot.

"Wireless," the instrumental track on your forthcoming single "Shine" is pretty good, did you get carried away with that?
"Wireless" is my favourite single so far, even though it's an awful, bad mix. I had been mixing it from seven till eleven in the morning and we had to get it to the cut that day. I was really, really rushed and stressed and the strings are way to loud, but never mind, that was really interesting. I liked the idea where the original sampling came from the piano, you know the little bit? I was in Jerusalem in August last year.

I did it originally because we were commissioned by this woman in America, who does plugs for films and things, she told us she liked one of my songs and got it onto Baywatch. It turned out very good even though it was mixed very quickly and I added all these little bits from songs that I had years ago.

Anyway I was out in Jerusalem with my mum as she was doing some talks on art therapy. I thought, never having seen this before, I'd go. It didn't turn out to be much of a holiday. On the first day we got there, the two suicide bombers did their thing. The talk was supposed to end at four, but we had to stay later, at five past four the bomb went off and there were a lot of casualties. We didn't know what it was because the people that we were staying with told us "if you hear something which you think is a bomb, don't worry, be calm, it's just a pigeon scarer, it's all died down now". So when it went off even though you felt it, you shuddered all through your body. My mum turned around and said to everybody "don't worry, it's not a bomb" and of course everyone is using their mobiles to check if their families are alright and they're going "no, no it's definitely a bomb."

Luckily no-one was affected in the group, but if we had stepped out some five minutes earlier we would have been killed. I was really shaken up by this, there happened to be a little piano in the room and so I messed about on the piano and I took a sample of the first opening bit and it's made around that and I tried to make it feel as I did on that day which is quite haunting.

It sounds like you like the mix that you did but the fact that it's rushed, you'll get another chance to record it won't you?
Probably not I'll just leave it. I've got so much stuff I'll never get a chance to release it all. I try to do an instrumental on every B-side. I would like to produce an album of instrumentals and a live album. I just want to get loads of material out.

How did you get signed, did you send in a tape, were you approached at a gig?
I was kinda doing a little gig at the foyer of my school. Well it wasn't a gig I was just messing around because it was lunch hour and my manager was walking around the area, scattering about, saw me, came and sat down and listened. He said afterwards that he really enjoyed it, I thought nothing of it. A couple of weeks afterwards I brought him back some demo tapes and he really liked them. He took me round some publishing houses and that's it.

You recorded your album in New York, what was that like for you?
It was fantastic, I just love New York. It's now one of my favourite places. I had never been there before.

Was there anything special that stood out?
I just love the people, they're all individual, completely diverse. I've just read American Psycho as well, that's set in New York, it enlightened me on parts of New York that I hadn't seen.

There was one experience that I had after several drinks. I was walking around with my walkman on really loud and there was one song that I was really into at the time, Sublime's "What I've Got". It was produced by the same guy that was producing my album so I thought I'd listen to it. I was hanging around Brooklyn Bridge on my own. The skyline view was just the best ever. It's just a huge city, not in width but in height. I was sitting there watching people walk and cycle by. I put on the song when the sun started to go down and all the lights flickered and begun to come on. I just started to dance and no-one seemed to care.

Do you prefer to be called a performer or a musical artist?
How about a performing musical artist?

So has life as a performing musical artist been what you expected?
I didn't expect so much business to be involved. When I started I thought they were like "you just go and write and we'll sort everything out blah, blah, blah". But it's NOT like that at all. You are meeting different people all the time. It's very hard sometimes because you're being questioned and analyzed all the time by journalists, radio people, everyone really and you've just got to be really, really certain of yourself the whole time or the record people will just grind you down.

What's been your best moment since this all began?
There's been so many. I can't count them all and my worst moment & dots...there hasn't been one yet.

What TV show would you most like to perform a set on?
I don't really watch TV - Later with Jools Holland - he's quite cool, he's got interesting tastes. The White Room if it ever came back.

If you were a character in a cartoon show which cartoon show would it be?
Roadrunner, being chased, making lots of noise, a complete individual doing it's own thing, lanky. Is it lanky? It's got long legs hasn't it?