I was still kicking my heels, wondering what direction to take,writing more stuff, when my friend Kimble, ex-AAE drum & bass tech, introduced me to Bernard Butler, then in Suede. Kimble was working forthem. We got on very well. I thought he was an extraordinary talent,and, a lovely man. He gave me a piece of music on a cassette. I took it home and sang to it. He heard it and loved it. We wrote about 12other songs. Surprisingly, they were very acoustic, and not at all 'Suede'.

Bernard left Suede, not at all because of what we were doing, but for his own reasons. He and I took our tape to Geoff at Rough Trade. He loved it, and wanted us to make an album. A month later, we were in France in a beautiful chateau, using one of the old Abbey Road desks that studio owner Mike Hedges had bought. We started working on a couple of the tracks we'd written. Then, I don't really know why it exploded the way it did, but it did. It was a small thing that turned into a big thing, that turned into an enormous thing. The next day, I was driving back to Caen to pick up a ferry home.

I was livid at the time. And, I totally blamed Bernard. On reflection, this wasn't fair. I think that I was still suffering post-AAE syndrome, and Bernard had just been through some big psychological stuff himself. It was a shame. We had actually created some really beautiful songs together, and, had become friends. Maybe we weren't cut out to have any kind of longevity together, but I do wish we'd completed the album. It's a shame that those songs will never be heard.

"Incidentally, re the Bernard Butler interview, I've read this in a couple of his interviews, this thing about me calling him 'Satan' or whatever, and it is honestly not true ! I don't know, it's as if he's said it so many times that he's now convinced himself that it is true and that I did actually say it. I didn't.

However, he once told a journalist who knew a journalist friend of mine that, after things had gone all wrong at that residential studio in France, in the middle of the might, he and his wife heard me wandering outside on the landing and stopping outside their bedroom door and saying 'Bernard ! You are the Devil ! Bernard, you are the Devil!', to which he was supposed to have replied 'No I'm not, I'm Bernard'. This did not happen, although had it done, he'd have deserved a medal for cool reply !

One funny thing that he did say was that on my telling him that I could 'have more fun making an album with my Dad' than with him, he replied 'Well why don't you make an album with your dad then ?' ....which, although not intended to amuse me, did."