PE: The truth is that there’s a different pressure when you’re working with someone who’s a friend, whose judgment you trust.
BD: Yeah, that’s true.

PE: You don’t want to let yourself down, and you don’t want to let them down, but it’s not for the ego and pressure of having to do something for your career, for the hamster wheel. And that is actually why we should all be making music, because there’s an integrity in it.
BD: It’s freeing.

PE: My usual thing is to go and make some club bangers and they don’t go anywhere because I don’t finish them – they end up in a hard drive gathering dust. So this is a really good opportunity to have you guiding me.
BD: And it worked like that pretty quickly, didn’t it? I mean, you’ve got quite a kind of… How do I put it? For you to finish something or do something, you’ve got to go into a bit of a zone, which is slightly uncommunicable in a way.

PE: When I get into that space, there’s a phase of putting the bones of an idea together, which I have to do really fast, otherwise the idea will never exist. If I can just get that first bit together – that might be twenty minutes, it might be an hour – then take a deep breath and ask, “Is it worth pursuing?” And if it is, then you dive back in, like, “Oh, let’s see what happens if we push and pull this.” You were very patient with me, giving me a minute to get to this point.
Baxter: Well, in a way, I wasn’t really able to interrupt because we were at the mercy, or privilege, of your invite. [Paul laughs] That’s quite a good thing because those conditions prohibited me from flapping. I can sink a massive-sized vessel by flapping. You didn’t even notice it.

PE: I did notice the flapping, but I guess that I was taking you out of your comfort zone, dragging you, kicking and screaming. It required me to be like… I just keep going back to that Eno quote: “Art is the one place where we can crash our plane and walk away from it.” You can afford to take a risk and for it to be a total disaster, an experiment. Do you know what I mean? So you getting your disco pants on and stepping out of your Hammersmith miserablism [both laugh], you can afford to go, “Is this the right iteration?” I think there were a few things where we just went, “Ah, that’s rubbish.” And they went into the hard drive, never to be seen again.
BD: In fact, there are loads of other brilliant ideas we did that, in the speed and the process, were just sort of discarded. We didn’t have the time to think about them much, but they’re brilliant as well. There’s something I heard this morning, except my computer crashed and when I took it to Apple, they wiped the whole hard drive. So I lost a quarter of a book and all my demos. They said, “You backed this up?” And I went, “What chance is it that I’ll lose the hard drive?” And they went, “Only one percent.” And then they wiped it. But I don’t worry about that stuff because you just start again, right? The book was a bit annoying, but I think the book is shit anyway, so it’s quite good. I’m quite spiritual about it. But anyway, the point was that just before that happened, I was listening to everything and it was really good. I really enjoyed the whole experience, to be honest. And not that I don’t usually, but because you were parenting it through in a way, and that was quite unique to me because I’d never really been with a producer in that way. It was quite a relaxing way of working. It allows someone like me to be better at what I do. I was quite comfortable with you doing the music.

PE: You quickly relinquish control. I think once you took Allbarone away and came back with Jay’s vocal on it like, “I think I’ve got something,” we then stuck it down and then I went, “How about just putting spaces in here?” and we went, “Oh God, that sounds really great.” Suddenly, we had something approaching a realised idea of our weird mutant hybrid.
BD: That’s what you need, to find a shared moment of acceptance.

PE: It’s suddenly the access point, isn’t it?
BD: And people like JGrrey were great when they came. Magical people.

Paul Smith Leather Sleeved Jacket: £795

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