M: I'd written songs since I was eight. My dad encouraged me, he was doing a PhD about the way children acquire language and was always recording our improvisations, spoken or sung, on expensive German Uher tape recorders borrowed from the university. So there are tapes of me plonking out songs in the 60s. (One is a secret track on 'Little Red Songbook'). I had piano, violin and guitar lessons at school. I was in the second orchestra and the choir, but I was always being demoted and flung out because I never learned to read music. I sat there improvising on the violin during concerts rather than playing along to the score, because it was more fun. I had a good 'ear' (I came out top of the class in note-difference detection tests) but was too lazy or impatient to learn technicalities. My guitar teacher used to make fun of my need to doodle and improvise all the time, instead of doing scales and learning pieces by rote. And my violin teacher was totally sarcastic when I tried to write some music, playing it on the piano scornfully, making it sound as bad as he could. People like this put me off any formal music training. And people like David Bowie and Brian Eno turned me onto the idea that music was all about roles, ideas, references to other arts, texture, process, charisma, etc. rather than technical ability.

In the 70s, Bowie and Eno were living in the present, whereas my music teachers were about one hundred years behind the times.

J: You've brought up David Bowie a few times; he seems to have been something of an influence on you–you've even remarked on your site that you wouldn't mind Bowie ripping off your ideas. What is it about Bowie–as a model of how to approach the pop environment and as a performer–that appealed to you? And are you planning on following his lead and turning yourself into a corporate entity?

M: There certainly isn't going to be a Momusbank any time soon!

No, David Bowie was simply the dominant personality of my formative years. It was pretty inevitable that I would collide with his influence. It happened first when I was 12, when I got exposed to his first four albums at boarding school. They were what the cool boys were listening to. Then it happened again when his Berlin period of arty angst coincided with the arty angst of my own late adolescence.

What is it about him? I suppose the fervour with which he played out in public the idea of the 'restlessly creative commercial artist'. I was very much into commercial art. I wanted to be an industrial or graphic designer. Bowie had been a commercial painter, and would often compare making records to 'carting your paintings round the galleries' or the ad agencies. He made no secret of his 'commercial' qualities: he would change style with shocking frequency and opportunism, he would keep the product (himself) fresh with constant relaunches and revamps, he would rip off other people's ideas quite blatantly. All this made him the perfect role model for an aspiring 'commercial creative'. Bowie was one part Picasso, one part Bill Bernbach. But he was also an index of all other artists. You could 'hear' everyone from The Velvet Underground to Neu at a fraction of the cost of buying their records, just by buying the Bowie versions. He was both good-looking and intelligent. He had a somewhat 'schizoid' personality, as I fancied I did too. There was this funny ideology in the songs, part Aleister Crowley, part George Orwell, part Jean Genet, with bits of A Clockwork Orange thrown in . . . I don't know, you had to be there in the 70s to know that there really was nothing even half as exciting on the landscape. It all ended with Scary Monsters, alas.

J: You just moved from New York to Japan; your oft-collaborator Kahimi Karie grew up in Japan and got out to Europe as soon as she got the chance. What is it that drew you to Japan; and are those to any extent the same things that drove Karie away?

M: I think we both want to have lives we 'weren't supposed to'. We want to escape destiny.

What draws me to Japan? The average person here is, markedly more than the average person in the UK or the US: polite, sexy, clean, somewhat perverse, intelligent, imaginative, refined and aesthetic, slim, industrious, cheerful, depressed, unified, subtly resistant to the global monoculture, well-dressed, gadget-obsessed, already living in the future, respectful of creativity, has excellent taste in food and a healthy diet, is more likely to ride a bicycle, uses a clean, efficient and comfortable public transport system, collects beautiful objects with fervour, appreciates cats, drinks tea rather than coffee, reads trendy magazines avidly in cafes, travels a lot, goes to the tender fantasy palace of a love hotel or seeps in a hot spring bath, sips sake... etc. The personality profile of the average Japanese is close to my personality profile in many ways. I'm more at home here than I am 'at home'.

Did these things drive Karie away to Paris? Probably not, unless you say her move was typically Japanese: 'refined and aesthetic', she chose Paris as a centre of culture, 'respectful of creativity' she went to the source of her beloved french pop; 'collecting beautful objects with fervour' she scoured the puces for classic Modernist furniture at prices cheaper than you'd find in Japan . . . etc.

J: Here's the mandatory war question. You were living in New York when the World Trade Center was destroyed; you left for Japan a few months afterward. I wonder if the post 9-11 environment was something that influenced your move; also now that you have a bit of distance from it, what's you take on what's going on in America and in the Middle East right now? Because, at least from my angle, I saw Bush speak in San Jose a week ago and it was amazing–it really does seem like the lunatics have taken over the asylum, but people are numb to it now, even events as cataclysmic as what's going on in America and the Middle East have become more TV fare.