Gotcha

The tape went round London the way tapes did. Muff Winwood at Sony liked it and wanted to talk, which was flattering and came to nothing, as these things do. And Feargal Sharkey - who was at that time an A&R man at a company whose name i have genuinely forgotten, which pleases me more than it should - sent back the form rejection with, and i want you to picture the typeface, the words: Sorry! – no Top Of The Pops for you this week!

Two years later, in a pub, i watched Feargal Sharkey get let go from that job, at a point when i happened to have a record in the German charts. i am not a vindictive man. i simply have an excellent memory and a website.

My lawyer said: go and talk to Martin Goldschmidt at Cooking Vinyl.

What Martin did in that first meeting is the reason i never left. He did not tell me it was going to be marvellous. He told me that the company was in trouble - their distributor had collapsed without warning and taken money with it - and that he could not offer me much of anything except this: he would put out what i made, he would not tell me what to make, and he would still be there in ten years.

It took him two years to actually sign me. When it was done he smiled a small private smile, looked me in the eye, and said very quietly: Gotcha.

He was right to look pleased. Over the next seventeen years he put out an enormous number of my records - and would tell anyone who asked that it was far too many, and that i kept coming up with scams to get another one out, which is a fair description of a working relationship that made both of us happy.

The trouble was the other thing.

i had not performed since the band and had no intention of ever performing again. Trauma is the word i have used about it and i use it advisedly, having built an entire recovery on the assumption that i would never again have to stand in front of people. Martin worked on me for a long time, patiently, the way you work on a horse that has been hit.

Where it finally happened was a music business trade fair in Berlin, in a club called Quasimodo - and if you have been paying attention you will know that i had been drinking in Berlin clubs since 1971, and that the city had been the place where things first became permissible for me. It took Berlin twenty-four years and two lives to have another go at me.

Then the records, in a flood.

The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death has Robert Bly on it, reading two poems he came into the Townhouse Studios in Shepherd's Bush to record for me - The Garden by Antonio Machado, and Clay Jug by Kabir. People write Hafiz. It is Kabir. i was in the room.

In the booklet of Fairytales for Hardmen there are two pages that say In Loving Memory, because two friends died in quick succession while it was being made. One was Eva Loewe. The other was Shannon Doyle, who was an Irish-Canadian transsexual professional killer, and who fed me most of the images that later became Lovers at the Gun Club.

i know. i can hear you. i have been telling that one for fifteen years and i am not withdrawing it now, on paper, at my age. Some things are true in the way a song is true, and the fact that a man once left a city in a hurry because people thought he had commissioned something does not stop being interesting simply because it cannot be checked.

Martin Okasili sang Mad As The Mist And Snow and Old West African Song for that record, in the Milo Studios in Hoxton, and i will say here in cold print what i have said in bars: those two vocals are the most moving things on any record with my name on it, and i did not sing them.

And then there was the Haunted Valley.

That was me and my friend Mick Nolan, out of a post office box in Belper, Derbyshire, and it was the single best idea i ever had about this business. Fourteen pounds a year in the UK. A magazine four times a year - May, August, November, February - with my ramblings in it, and interviews, and a poem from Liam Carson. And once a year, in the August post, a CD of unreleased material that you could not buy anywhere.

Not a fan club. A subscription to a small, strange, unprofitable country of which i was the only export.

The industry took another fifteen years to arrive at the arithmetic, which is that there were not many of us but there were enough of us, spread from Bergen to Bautzen to Brisbane, and every single one of them would rather have a badly photocopied magazine and a CD in a brown envelope from a man in Derbyshire than nothing at all. It will not be in the shops - because there are no shops, or at least not many.

i was a cottage industry, and there was nobody in my cottage.

People quote a line back at me about those years, about being an abject failure, and i did say it, to the Guardian, in 2001, and i meant it the way a man means anything at four in the afternoon in front of a journalist. The arithmetic says something else. A voice that came back wrong, a trade i was frightened of, a label run by one honest man, and four hundred songs out the other end, which no accountant alive would call a plan and which i would not swap for one….