making Debut

At that time you were looking in new directions. Looking around to work with new people. You talked about "brass arrangements" on your new songs. And you were experimenting with electronic music ?

When I made ’Debut’ I think the ideas had been gathering for a long time without me necessarily thinking about a solo album. Hundreds of ideas in my pocket that couldn’t find an outlet with the band. Then it was a bit clumsy at putting things into pratice, at that time anyway. I started with those "brass concepts". I met Graham Massey and of course I was working flat out on concepts that didn’t come to the surface until the later albums. I just managed to touch on what I had in mind, or I thought so anyway. That was my experience of ’Debut’. Meeting Nellee Hooper went a bit against the grain there. It wasn’t planned. I met loads of people at that time, met Nellee and went clubbing a lot. At the clubs we often ended up discussing music and more than not we had totally different ideas. So in the end we decided to do one song together and then we did another. We did one song at a time, and in the end I asked him if he wanted to do the whole album with me. I was in the position that this was the strongest musical relationship I was in at that time. The good thing about it was realising how totally crazy it was for us to work together. When we met, I’d just left the band, he’d been working with Soul II Soul, a trendy band with black influences. I came from a completely different direction and my ideas were totally different. I think that was why we could blend together.

Livebox interview, 2002