Paul [ Burwell] and I had also got interested in making books. We'd been working with Bob Cobbing, the sound poet, since the beginning of the 70s, and Bob had this press called Writers Forum.

I think I was like [a game of] skittles, knocked apart by this wooden ball, and there's a strength to that: you're not too self-conscious about what you're doing, so you're not too worried about it.

At that time, 73 and 74, I became aware that there were a number of us making instruments. Max Eastley was a good friend and he was making instruments, Paul Burwell and I were making instruments, Evan Parker was making instruments, and we knew Hugh Davies, who was a real pioneer of these amplified instruments.

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 was associated with the Artist Placement Group in the early 1970s and David Hall, the video artist, was an Artist Placement Group artist. I was completely broke at that time, and he said to me, "Come and do some teaching" - he was head of department at Maidstone College of Art. And I went and did a couple of teaching days and practically the only person who showed up was David Cunningham [Flying Lizard's main man], with all of this finished work

I needed a huge amount of energy to cope with my life. I had a huge amount of energy where stuff was concerned: it was as if all this unconscious material had been unleashed.

I had ideas about music and sound and listening and time and so on that I wanted to pursue as an individual, and by doing that book, Brian [Eno] opened the door, and he decided to do a record based loosely on the book.