Your album is going to be shredding a few speaker cones - it's a real celebration of the electric bass.

JPJ:"I hope so. That's what it was designed to do [laughs]. I'd been thinking of doing a solo album for a long time but I didn't know quite what style it would be. Initially it was going to be an electronic album, more abstract, but there was a riff I wrote when I was producing a band called Elephant Ride and another one that came out of my collaboration with Diamanda Galas in 1994. So I realised a rock album was taking shape, albeit an instrumental one."

Who's on the record?

JPJ:"Trey Gunn from King Crimson plays stick on two tracks, Paul Leary from the Butthole Surfers plays some guitar and Pete Thomas of the Attractions is on drums. But the rest is all me on 10- or 12-string bass or bass lap steel guitar, plus one frenzied organ solo before the London Symphony Orchestra comes in."

With the huge drum sound and angular riffs, there are moments when you expect That Voice to start up.

JPJ:"No, that wasn't likely. I don't sing myself and I really wanted this to be a personal record. I wrote the drum parts, I knew exactly how I wanted everything to work out. The recording process was not in the slightest bit democratic."

What will happen when someone shouts out for "Communication Breakdown" at your gigs?

JPJ:"I may do a couple of Led Zeppelin songs if I can think of a good enough arrangement, but there won't be a singer. There are plenty of other people doing Led Zeppelin songs. It happened even with Diamanda Galas. We were in Chicago and a little voice piped up, 'Song remains The Same', and she just turned and fixed him with this steely gaze and went, 'No it doesn't, motherfucker.' It was a marvellous moment."