I do still have dips of confidence or [can think] everything I do is rubbish.

I was working in, being a single parent with a grieving child of five years old. It was horrendous. I couldn't go out much, because I had my daughter to look after. So people used to come round, and Tony Harrington from The Wire came round.

I guess we all had that work ethic. None of us were rock stars, so if you had time in a studio, it was a big, big deal: you're not going to sit around taking drugs and drinking and waste it, you'll do something.

The Musicians Union declared you couldn't mime on Top Of The Pops, which is obviously impossible, if you've got a studio-based record that you'd worked on for a year or something. And there were a lot of terrible performances. Because on Top Of The Pops, you were just thrown onstage.

I think I sent one [book] to Brian Eno. I don't know how I got to know his address, but I sent one to him. He called me up and he said, "I really like the book, and I'm starting a new label, would you liked to do something?" It was a tricky situation for me, because I've always had this thing in my life of a tension between collaboration, which was extremely important to me, and then being alone. Make of that what you will!

I remember I did quite a lot of interviews when the book and the CD came out, and I did a drivetime interview for Radio London or something. You wouldn't immediately associate the music on Ocean Of Sound with drivetime radio, but people found things that they liked, and the DJ was playing some records at 5 o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday.The man who was playing them said to me, "That Peter Brotzmann track, it's like having your head boiled in acid."

One of the nicest things is that I still get, very ambiguously, people saying to me, "Oh, I'm just reading your book." And I say, "Which one, for God's sake, I've done six now!" "Oceans of Sound".