As for the Middle East, I'm afraid I just struck it off my list of places I'd ever want to visit. The places I just give up on are places riven by irrational and irresolvable hatred, racial or linguistic: Northern Ireland, Belgium, Quebec . . . The hard liners make things a hundred times worse. The two sides need to eroticize each other, entertain each other, amuse each other, fuck each other, interbreed, become indistinguishable. I guess that kind of thinking is what makes me an entertainer rather than a politician.

J: You say you want to live a life you weren’t supposed to. That really fascinates me, of course. Well, first what I would like to ask is, what was the life that you felt that you were destined to have? You said you want to escape destiny–like perhaps it's an ongoing process or struggle. How does that struggle play out for you, and what's your goal?

M: I guess my brother incarnates what I should have become, in the minds of my parents anyway. They respect academics more than artists. Actually, they're always encouraging me to write fiction, as if creative ideas on a white printed page are visible, respectable and profound whereas creative ideas sung or drawn are somehow incoherent and evanescent and illegitimate. This is odd, because my father's brother is quite an eminent choral conductor, but I suppose he's doing interpretative (i.e. rather academic) work with notes 'written down', so it's 'real'. My parents to this day complain that they can't hear what I'm singing. They want it in writing. Then again, when they read what it says, they don't even want it in writing!

There's also a national element to 'escaping destiny'. I've always wanted to be 'less British' and 'less American', because those seem to be 'destiny'. So I looked to Germany, France and Japan–or ethnic music–mostly for my musical inspiration, rather than America. And as soon as I could, I went to live in other countries–France, the US (ironically!) and Japan. I wanted to transcend the socialisation processes of each country–the TV shows people reference, the sports they follow–and become truly cosmopolitan and rootless, like the negative stereotype of the 'international Jew' with loyalties to no-one, but a canny understanding of the prejudices and habits of the indigenous population in each place.

To some extent, I think I've now achieved this. But it's not as dramatic as, say, the Beats living in Tangier in the 50s. The world is now pretty accessible, and many people travel. Right now I'm cursing some Americans who live across the road from me in Tokyo, because they're revving their noisy motorbikes, something Japanese wouldn't do (unless they were Shibuya yakuza). I can't escape them. I'm too late to be Lafcadio Hearn.

I'm a liberal diverger, by which I mean that I'm happy to criticize my own culture, and tend to want to learn about and embrace other cultures, believing they can teach me something.

This trait in my personality leads me to stock up on foreign culture, to travel, to fetishize 'the Other' and its right to differ.

Not content with being a mere cultural tourist, I want to immerse myself in other cultures, and go to live in other countries.

It's then that the paradox kicks in. I discover that the people like myself in those other cultures–the liberal divergers, in other words–are reaching out to me as a symbol of the western monoculture I am seeking to escape.

For instance, when I moved to France and asked some musicians in a bar to play some Brel they pooh poohed me and played The Doors instead. Just last week here in Japan I was asked to provide music for a Japanese film (influenced by Harmony Korine, rather than by actual conditions in Japan) which portrays Japanese kids as fat on junk food, wearing dirty track suits, tagging and vandalising the suburbs of Tokyo. (I said yes, I needed the money. But clearly in collaborating with Japanese 'liberal divergers', I was telling lies about and undermining the very Japan I had come here to find.)

So having come to France or Japan in an attempt to subvert my own cultural conditioning and find otherness, I meet fellow 'liberal divergers' who are also attempting to subvert their cultural conditioning and find otherness–in their case, in western, specifically American, culture, with all its 'glamourous' ugliness (grafitti! junk food! delinquency!). I'm thinking Ozu and Terayama, they're thinking Korine and Jarmusch.

The refreshingly strange local heritage I seek does, of course, exist in Japan. It's mostly in the hands of the very old and the very reactionary, the 'conservative convergers' who are the diametrical opposite of the 'liberal diverger' and wouldn't touch me with a bargepole. (Japanese traditional music, I'm told, is strongest in Okinawa, the southern island dominated by a huge US base.)