Well, you know, I mean, I first did my live shows in the late 70's and in those days I had a boatload of equipment that always seemed to be going wrong.

I was desperate really for people not to accuse me of coldness. It was taboo.

It was supposed to be a year or two just to refresh my batteries, but I moved to Silicon Valley in the early 90's, and one thing let to another, got very involved in high tech, and formed a company and it ended up doing pretty well.

When the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel.

It's been over 15 years since I toured... over 12 years since I did any recording under my own name. I never really intended to take that long of a hiatus.

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be.