You never go to the theatre and assume that person on stage is the playwright. You just assume that the playwright invents personas and they interact on stage. This is what I would like songs to be like, where it becomes clear that you are no longer saying, 'This is me expressing myself'. I don't thrive on the feeling of exploiting the territory once I've got there."While Eno has certainly risen to the songwriting challenge on Another Day On Earth, he has also been at pains to disguise his singing. "And those are both very important jobs, but my thrills come from the pioneering side I thrive on the feeling of being where nobody's been before.

It's no easier now than it was in Chaucer's day." Eno left Roxy Music in 1973 after, famously, he found his on-stage thoughts drifting to his laundry. Nowadays pop music accounts for a relatively small portion of a working life which also takes in writing, visual art, and talks on such rarefied topics as the links between architecture and doo-wop."Among artists there are people who are the explorers or the pioneers, and the settlers," Eno says. "Well, songs are very exposing; there's no technological solution to songwriting. His voice then gives way to a string-laden instrumental passage of astonishing beauty. "It's very easy to make music nowadays," says Eno, smiling broadly and offering an unexpected glimpse of a gold tooth. In the opening track "This", Eno questions his place on the planet amid twitchy techno beats, while the new single "How Many Worlds" finds him reflecting on "our little world turning in the blue".

While the distorted instrumentals and shuffling rhythms echo ambient works such as Another Green World, there are also sweeping choruses and pop melodies. At once chaotic and ordered, the studio is the ultimate reflection of the mind of the man popularly known as "Professor Eno". We are here to talk about his 13th solo album, Another Day on Earth. It is a remarkable work, not least because it is his first collection of fully formed songs since 1974's Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. A long crushed-velvet coat hangs over the back of a chair, a reminder of its owner's tenure as the flamboyant synthesiser wizard in Roxy Music.