Our neighbours' garden has solar-powered night-lights. I wonder what exactly they're trying to illuminate? Are they afraid of the dark, or simply trying to capture the stars, one by one? I'm looking at the bigger picture, joining the dots in the darkness.

Each dot is a ruby-red ink-spot, each idea a puncture, each experience another gash revealing what was hidden. There is no pain, just the exhilaration of the adrenaline rush. Each opening reveals more of the body inside: startled, raw and wondrous.

I need scars to halt the flow, memories written on the body to prompt my own torrent of words. This gushing life-force runs through me and out of me and it's all I can do to channel it. I try to pass sentence, but it's so real that the words won't heal.

But find each other they did. They learned how to coalesce, re-shape, re-form. They bound together more tightly, became something harder and more enduring. They learned a valuable lesson, then forgot why it had been necessary.

And now you've invaded my thoughts once again. This time, I am ready. This time you pass straight through me, because I've learned that the best way to take a bullet is to offer no resistance, but simply to refuse to bleed.

Why now, I wonder... Did you think fondly of the former sparring partner who once returned your punches with humour and grace? Did you come to crow, imagining yourself a victor? Or are you finally as lost as you once made me?

You're now nothing more than a symbol. You stand for everything against which I was subconsciously kicking, even without realising it. You stand for everything that I never wish to be. Now I know what I want to say to you.

Fuck you. With unthinking callousness. With nerves, anxiety and fear. With insipid subversion. With spineless insidiousness. With the bloodless inhumanity of all that is wrong with this world. Fuck you. Just like you fucked me.

You underestimated the madness in my method. The wounds have closed, the scars have healed, my silvery blood flows strong and free. My words are weapons for a different war: in a space you cannot see, a place you will never be.

She taunts me from a downpipe, broadcasting the plans of her infernal mission, knowing that I have holes in my hands and cannot catch her. Her purpose is greater than mine: creation and propagation. I, in return, can offer only silence and oblivion.

She will win. This is how the world keeps turning.

Now I live in the city, surrounded by feathered fiends: blackbirds, magpies, pigeons. Beady-eyed hustlers, sparkling scavengers, thoughtless vermin. Canada geese, with territorial, traffic-jam honks. Sea-less gulls. Invading parakeets, Ballardian and strange in the evening sunlight.

My friend wants to work with the ravens in the Tower: agoraphobic guardians, who might yet teach her how to fly. Me, I've been studying a different shade of blackness: the life and songs of the Crow. I'm gorging on mouthfuls of Ted's carrion canon, digesting durian words of faith and fury.

Our most significant philosophical disagreement was, characteristically, conducted on a grand scale. He insisted on the notion of the fundamental commonality of everything. He dreamed of the beauty of transcendence, the corrosion of difference and the white landscapes of infinity. I could never see the world in those terms. His blissed-out melange was, to me, a fruitless mixing of colours that resulted only in a brownish-grey sludge.

Twenty years later, still pondering philosophy, creativity and identity, I find myself observing an online discussion on meditation and mindfulness. It's interesting, but I'm having trouble relating my own rather limited level of experience to what's being said. Then there's a shift sideways towards flow, the zone and creativity. Whiskey expresses something that pulls together many of my recurring thoughts of recent years:

"... creativity is essentially an overwhelming presence of awareness, and may very well be mindfulness, and could be a form of meditation, or it could be more like lucid dreaming (outside of dreaming - as in, lucid wakefulness), or it could be the state attained through the creative mind, which seems to be on a whole different level of consciousness altogether."

To which I find myself responding intuitively, with little conscious analysis:

"Yes, yes, yes. And can we throw the word 'otherness' in there somehow as well? Creativity as an approaching of the divine via a process of lucid mindfulness that allows us to appreciate, however briefly and superficially, the intrinsic strangeness of everything other than oneself."

Suddenly I'm back in the Rosemary Branch, with the beer-sodden and ash-stained carpet swirling around me. It's then, yet it's now. Johnny, on the other side of the table, speaks our common language - Blake - and asks me why I persist in closing myself up, till I see all things thro' narrow chinks of my cavern. With the benefit of two further decades of innocence and experience, I gather my thoughts and take a deep breath...

We're all looking for meaning in life, one way or another. I've come to the conclusion that meaning comes from creativity. Creativity in its broadest sense: the bees in the garden gathering pollen to make honey, friends and family making relationships and babies, businesses concocting fascinating products, singers pulling together words and melodies, painters filling canvases with dreams and desires.

Creativity can be solid and tangible, but it can also be abstract and ethereal. An idea is as much of a creation as an iPhone. In fact, an iPhone is an idea; one hundred thousand iPhones are considerably less interesting. The joy, the beauty, the hope, is in the singularity. It's in the fact that one thing is not like another. And the source of that sense of singularity, strangeness, otherness, is the divine.

I like that word: divine. It can be breathed languidly, conveying a shallow, ephemeral joy, or it can be spoken with reverence and weight. As a noun or adjective it has an overwhelmingly spiritual connotation, yet as a verb it seems more pragmatic. To divine something is to discover or perceive it. At first sight that looks like an entirely different meaning, but I'm coming to realise that it's part of the same process.

To discover something is to encounter its essence, which the dictionary describes as "the basic, real, and invariable nature of a thing or its significant individual feature or features". Its true identity, in other words: what makes it different to everything else. It strikes me that art - creativity - is the process of divining and defining uniqueness. It's fine to make connections between things, but ultimately those things are separate.

Does that sound too bleak? I see it as strength, as infinite richness. Too abstract? We all encounter art on a daily basis, in one form or another. Too solipsistic? I can't dispute that: all I am is all I am. Too esoteric and religious? Even Wild Billy Childish, purveyor of fine garage rock 'n' roll songs about beating his father up, declares his solidarity with "every living artist who dares to draw God on this planet."

Much has happened since we last met, Johnny. The wall has fallen, yet still I chase its ghost, believing in this Other divinity that stems from separation. You would throw the switch and enlighten us all, whereas I doubt the ability of the world to withstand the gaze of a god whose eyes are twin suns. From my cavern perspective, I still believe that the darkness in the spaces between us is where the creator dwells.

I am possessed by the rasping, sandpaper tongue of cat lick confession. The sinuous, feline beauty of liturgy and performance, the revelation of sins and miracles. The congregation of troubled souls, the guilty pleasure of wine and song. The body, the blood, the absolution.

In the churches that I attend, the music is fuelled by a darkness of faltering intensity. Enlightenment burns with the slow intention of an all-consuming flame. We inhale the heady smoke like incense and exhale with the sated pleasure of those who have breathed the divine.

Knock knock. Who's there? No one. The rain has poured, the door has jammed shut. It will not let me out and it will not let you in. The house has spoken one hollow word: no. A threshold has been reached, the portal cannot be breached. The birds sing from the trees, but the melody falters and stutters at the glass. There is no exit, only reflection.

There are blue rats and she-wolves in the room with me. Urras and Anarres colliding, blank frequencies broadcasting the crackle of warring stations. A voice whispers in my ear: hot time, cold logic, anarchy and violence. A message is being received. Dot dot dot dot, dash dash dot... Dot dot dot dot, dash dash dot... Dot dot dot dot, dash dash dot...

The river is running dry, sticky silver streams congealing in the veins. A blue moon cowers behind a filthy cloud. I practice a mercy killing, but the moment has not yet come. A message is being transmuted by a blind alchemist: base metal, twisted elements and magnetic grace. I hold my bearing straight as the arrow swings to point back at me, into the heart of nothing.

I was a vessel but now I am empty. I was a carriage, now passenger-less and free of destination. The tunnel has been closed and I am sealed in, under the city, marooned in the suburbs, orbiting a distant star. The western queen is dead, the eastern king has not yet risen. There is no authority. There are no co-ordinates for the place where I have ceased to be.

Creativity occurs in the strangest of environments. A weed is just a plant in the wrong place, but sometimes the wrong place is exactly where you need to be.

All this talk of English identity, small Bedfordshire villages and my ongoing penchant for folky acoustic troubadours... he'll be raving about bloody morris dancing next, you're probably thinking. Well, a couple of days ago I'd have laughed out loud at the prospect. Where I grew up, morris dancing meant white costumes, tinkly bells and handkerchiefs. It was twee and appalling, this heritage of mine. As a teenager, I found it a huge embarrassment and I hated it.

In fact, being English was rather a disappointment. Why couldn't we have a decent folk mythology like the Welsh, Scottish and Irish, I used to wonder. I immersed myself in the Mabinogion and Celtic culture in general. This persisted well into my twenties. When I got married in an Irish Catholic church, my status as a pseudo-Celt felt complete. I'm even entitled to an Irish passport now, though I've never felt the slightest inclination to apply.

Over the past ten years or so, I've become more interested in English traditions and folklore. It turns out that it's not all as pretty and neutered as I'd youthfully assumed. Nevertheless, I've not been able to work up much passion for it. This weekend marked the annual May Day celebrations in many English villages, but even though I now understand the origins and significance of traditions like maypole dancing, I haven't particularly warmed to them.

Until yesterday, that is, when I went to the Rochester Sweeps Festival. The chimney sweeps held an annual festival there for hundreds of years, either in celebration of the warmer weather - meaning that they would be getting more business as fewer fires were lit - or as a single day off from an oppressive 364-day regime, depending on which history you read. The tradition died out at the end of the nineteenth century, but was revived in 1981 and has continued every year since.

An appealing mixture of beer, food, music and dancing, the Sweeps Festival was - and still is - great fun. I had a feeling I'd enjoy it, but it exceeded my expectations. The first group of dancers who I saw blew me away. With a percussive, insistent, minor-key musical backing and a striking, black-faced, hybrid Dickensian-pagan-Goth appearance, their performance was as far removed from the hankie-waving of my youth as you could imagine.

I assumed that the black faces were specific to this festival, but it turns out that they're from a much older tradition of disguise in the "border morris" variant of morris dancing. That adds an interesting perspective on the phenomenon; although border morris doesn't appear to be specifically anti-establishment, nevertheless the element of disguise means that it's broadly anti-surveillance (to avoid being caught earning extra money).

The two sides that I enjoyed the most were Beltane Morris* and Grimspound Border, both coincidentally from Devon and dancing in the (English-Welsh) border tradition. The latter in particular, as an all-male side, gave a heady performance fulled jointly by beer and testosterone. That's not to imply that the former were any less powerful: I narrowly avoided getting a matchstick-sized splinter of wood in my eye during one of their energetic dances.

So, who'd have guessed... I'm a morris dancing convert. Would it be fanciful to draw parallels between border morris and other more modern expressions of ramshackle English anti-authoritarianism (Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols, and so on)? The echo of the Sweeps Festival certainly lends an interesting slant to Medway-phile and tabloid jailbird Pete Doherty's interpretation of the sweeps' song Chim Chim Cheree at the Royal Festival Hall last year.

However tenuous or solid the philosophical links between border morris and contemporary music, there are numerous tangible similarities: the costumes mirror youth cults like the Goths and metalheads, there's a sense of fun paired with a mild undercurrent of danger; it's a hugely communal, celebratory form of entertainment and, in one performance that I watched, there was something that most contemporary gig-goers would probably recognise as moshing.

Far from being an archaic remnant of the past, border morris is vibrant, alive and fascinating. Encountering it at the Sweeps Festival - a broadly urban environment, despite the town's occasionally shabby prettiness - was the perfect introduction. Now I want to see more. A tradition that involves dressing up in black, drinking copious amounts of beer and making merry - if only I'd come across this as a teenager, my life could have followed a very different path indeed...

Further viewing

• Flickr: my Sweeps Festival 2008 set
• Flickr: everyone's Sweeps Festival 2008 pictures

* incorrectly credited in the festival's official booklet as "Belthanc Morris".

London feels like a particularly petulant child at times. Voting in Ken Livingstone as Mayor in 2000 was a poke in the eye not only for the Tories (who had dismantled Livingstone's Greater London Council back in 1986), but also for New Labour, from whom Livingstone had temporarily defected and against whom he was standing as an independent candidate.

And now we've booted him out, in favour of that nice blond man who we like on Have I Got News For You. We've gone from the newt-fancying, terrorist-loving, Socialist scourge to the gas-guzzling, thug-hating, bumbling Etonian (exaggeration used for comic effect... just). It's quite the pendulum swing and very tempting to speculate upon the reasons why.

The key issue seems to be a higher-than-usual turnout in London's outer suburbs, generally more mono-cultural and conservative (not to mention Conservative) than the inner boroughs. Boris Johnson has adeptly targeted this demographic via a series of striking and iconic images of a traditional London, such as bobbies on the beat and Routemaster buses.

More generally, there has been unrest in suburbia for years. I've seen it, because I live there. From a south-east London viewpoint, it's very easy to take the view that City Hall has very little impact on one's everyday life. Day-to-day services are provided by the local Borough. The tube service is temporarily non-existent and DLR & Tramlink penetration is minimal.

Meanwhile, the number of Union Jack and St George's Cross flags flown in our area continues to increase. The Mrs feared for her life when our elderly next-door neighbour put one up, though I reassured her that this was an altogether more gentle kind of Britishness than the strain she'd grown up with in Northern Ireland (let alone the hateful ignorance of the BNP).

This, I think, is what led to the election of Johnson this week. Many English people feel their national identity to be under threat. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have devolved parliaments/assemblies, yet England does not. It's a common complaint that the St Patrick's Day celebrations in London are more high-profile than those for St George's Day.

A glance at the pre-election candidates' booklet is instructive, particularly UKIP's "Fed up with not being listened to?" headline. It's also sometimes inadvertently hilarious. The BNP, for example, cites an Irish student as one of its supporters. Elsewhere, the English Democrats' candidate to "Save London from Labour's Tartan Taxes" is... Matt O'Connor.

The people living in London's outer suburbs tend to identify themselves overwhelmingly as "English". Many of them don't even feel part of the capital. The area where I live, for example, is administratively London but continues to align itself culturally with Kent, a county from which it was severed over forty years ago. It would rather fall under Maidstone than City Hall.

Nevertheless, part of London they are. In Johnson, they've found an empathetic candidate behind whom they've chosen to put their significant weight. Inner Londoners who sneer at the suburbs outside of Zone 2 might have had something of a rude awakening this morning. London's size defines it. Without these suburbs, it's just Northampton with trendier haircuts.

London's a big place and a significant proportion of its inhabitants has felt ignored and disenfranchised for some time. I understand their point of view, even if I don't share it. They didn't all distrust Ken Livingstone, but many couldn't really see what he had to offer them. Now, in Boris Johnson, they've found a voice. It'll be interesting to hear what they have to say.

A couple of months ago, I was contacted by a complete stranger via Genes Reunited, the sister site to Friends Reunited that deals with family history. GR is a cool site: a brilliant example of the power of focused social networking. You upload your family tree, in as much or little detail as you're comfortable with, and it matches you up with other people whose trees contain similar ancestors (based on name, date of birth and location of birth if provided).

Being contacted by a complete stranger isn't exactly a surprise: in fact, it's usually what you're aiming for. Assuming that you're still in touch with your immediate family, it's the strangers who can provide the most useful information. They're generally descended from several generations back - either by blood or marriage - and so you're able to make connections to the people who are your great-grandparents siblings' descendants, for example.

I've made contact with a handful of people in this way and thereby been able to trace specific branches of the family tree back to the 1600s. It's been fascinating. However, this particular contact was slightly different. Jean lives in a small village in Bedfordshire, the place where her husband's family was from. While he was tracing his own ancestry, she became interested in the village's families as a whole and researched them as her own pet project.

I had discovered only a few months beforehand that my great-great grandfather came from this village. Prior to coming across that specific nugget of information in a census return, we'd always assumed that my great-grandmother's family were Nottingham born and bred. It turned out that this wasn't the case; she was the first generation of that particular surname to be born in Nottingham. Her father was from Bedfordshire and her mother from Staffordshire.

Jean was organising a reunion of all the "old" families of the village. She provided copious documentation from her research, covering the village's history as a whole and my own ancestors' history in particular. They lived hard lives. Although the gentry controlling most of the village's land seem to have been unusually benevolent and enlightened, nevertheless poverty was rife and many families ended up leaving the village to seek a living elsewhere.

My ancestors lived in and around the village for much of the nineteenth century, though they had originally come from another village slightly further south. However, by the 1870s they clearly felt their lives there to be unsustainable. I discovered via my research that my great-great-grandfather, a farm labourer, had travelled north to Nottingham with one of his brothers. He met his future wife shortly thereafter; they married in 1878 and raised six children.

Elsewhere, I discovered that one of his brothers had ended up in Derby. The story passed down that branch of the family was that he had walked there from Bedfordshire. I wonder whether this other brother was the same one who accompanied him, according to my own family's collective memory? It's slightly humbling to think of the two of them making their way a hundred miles north on foot. (Of course, this could just be a myth that developed over the years.)

My mum says that when she was growing up, she and her parents never saw a great deal of my great-grandmother, my grandpa's mum. This Bedfordshire connection was news to her when I first discovered it. My great-grandma lived until I was six years old and apparently I met her several times, though I don't remember her. I remember the house though: small, dark, claustrophobic, with the same grandfather clock in the corner that now stands in my parents' hallway.

At this "family reunion" last Saturday, I finally met one of my distant relatives in the flesh: my sixth cousin once removed. Which basically means that his great-gt-gt-gt-gt-grandfather (born 1729, died 1789) was my great-gt-gt-gt-gt-gt-grandfather. A link so tenuous as to be almost unworthy of mention, yet a link nevertheless. A Bedfordshire farmer whose children's children's children's children's children's children's descendants had met again.

What would Lewis, son of Lewis, have thought of us? Firstly, he would probably have noticed that neither of us was called Lewis. (This name ran for at least seven generations in the family, but the last Lewis I'm aware of was my great-grandma's brother and I haven't yet traced his hypothetical descendants.) He would also have spotted that neither of us look particularly like sons of the soil and would have had no understanding of how I make a living.

In this sense, "family" is an abstract, theoretical concept. Yes, we undoubtedly share DNA and there's the nice poetic concept of "blood" that fires up my imagination. Yet I'm under no illusions; your family are the people who immediately surround you, related or not. I have far more in common with my brothers-in-law than with my distant cousin (clearly of a very different generation and mindset to me), or with our even more distant ancestor.

However, it's fun to make the connections and fascinating to think back to the lives of the people who ultimately made us and paved the way for us. It's also great to go to an event like this and talk to other people about what they've discovered about their own ancestry. The diversity is an eye-opener (one attendee was descended from one of the Norman soldiers who travelled to Britain with William the Conqueror) and the commonality of experience is rewarding.

The most tangible experiences of my visit to the village were the relics left behind from the period when my family still lived there. The "new" church clock, to which all the villagers subscribed (I saw the paperwork, detailing individual families' contributions). The church itself, with the family name on several headstones in the graveyard. The old blacksmith's building. The village hall in the former school they would have attended. The house where they lived.

I'm still absorbing it all. I think maybe the most significant impact this will have on me is to send me back to the village in Nottinghamshire next to the one where I grew up, where both of my dad's parents came from and where their ancestors lived for several hundred years. I've taken that proximity for granted for far too long and now it's time to start seeing the place with fresh eyes as the most significant source - of many possibilities - of where I'm "from".

Further reading

• Remembrance
• Roots That No Storm Can Dislodge
• The Big I Am

The harp has a rather chequered history, as far as popular music's concerned. Mention solo harpists and until recently I'd have thought of Mary O'Hara, Enya or Joanna Newsom. None of their music fills me with a great deal of enthusiasm. Actually, I'm just being polite. I think I'd rather slice my reproductive organs into morsel-sized bites with their instrument of choice than have to endure more than a few seconds of their music.

Then I came across Michael McLinn, whose contemplative, graceful and occasionally subversive songs are based on nothing more than his own voice, the occasional burst of piano and the pure, untreated sounds of the very same instrument that has so often been the basis for nothing more than bland hotel lobby music. Investigating further, I found a performer whose approach and attitude is about as far removed from the conventional as you could possibly expect.

Take, for instance, the lyrics to Hobnob With The Gentry ("stick classical technique up your arse on my behalf"), the list of influences encompassing Harpo Marx, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Marie Antoinette and Madonna, or the picture of him looking every inch the Kashpoint kid in thigh-high silver boots. With one self-produced album already under his belt (Some Strings Attached from January 2007), he was clearly a performer to investigate.

The obvious first question is why you choose to play the harp rather than any other instrument?

I had been writing songs on a keyboard, which I stole from my little sister. I really wanted some classical training, but thought it would be silly to take piano lessons as I could already navigate one. At the time I was listening to a lot of Björk and when I heard her Vespertine record, which uses a lot of harp, I thought "Thats it!" My songs are little and fiddly, not so full-bodied, so the harp really suits them. I managed to track down the [Brighton] Pavilion harpist - Andrew Ballantyne - and he has been teaching me for about three years now.

When did you start writing and performing music?

I have been writing for about five years. In the beginning I knew nothing about music and would have to go through each note to find the ones that were the same as the ones in my head. If you think how many notes are in a song, it was a very slow process. Now music comes more naturally, and what I write is actually good. Performing took a lot longer. I did not want to compromise... that these songs were for harp, but I did not own a harp till much later. Andy Drake, my harp, cost a lot, and I don't drive so he is really difficult to move around.

Your harp has a name? How did that come about?

My instructor's harps have names. He told me it's bad luck not to name your harps. Andy is the name of my instructor, and he choose the harp for me. I had a certain budget and I just said to him "Look, I trust you go and get me a boy harp," so he played a part in the birth of my harp - not only my learning of it. "Drake" is just there, like many things, to pull in the naval nautical theme.

How would you describe your music to someone who hasn't heard it yet?

If someone has not heard my music I try not to describe it to them. What I do is make a mental note to get them a copy of my record as soon as possible.

There's a big "folk" resurgence at the moment (a.k.a. nu-folk, antifolk, folktronica, and so on). Is this something you feel part of, or would you rather distance yourself from it?

Musically I am influenced by each. There are two traditional songs I sing at shows sometimes. I don't like the idea of being part of a scene though - having to wear certain clothes or play certain clubs would depress me.

Which traditional songs do you sing?

I play Lord Ronald, which I first heard recorded by Alisdair Roberts, who I love. Its a really simple song musically, but has a little twist in the storyline. I also sometimes start with an accapella version of Visur Vatnsenda Rosu, which is an Icelandic song. I first heard an instrumental version of this at a Björk concert, then looked the lyrics up in a book. I would sing over the instrumental as a warm-up, then just decided to include it in shows. Musically the chord progression lends itself nicely to the beginning of Vessel And Machine, which is usually my second song.

You call your songs "the boys". That makes them sound like children, or friends. Does it feel like they have a separate existence to you?

The boys... yes, they do feel seperate. This is basically me trying not to take credit for what I consider to be an age-old tradition. I have some control over them, as far as when they come, which boys turn up at a show. But how they are, I cannot control too much, or maybe I just try not to. But they are not always friendly... never childish. I have only had one experience of talking to somebody make-believe who actually dictated how the song should be, but this comes into play with each. I don't know whether its the harp being male or me being male that produces boys and not girls.

Is there any sense in which the boys are potential lovers, however platonic?

That's quite funny. but it also makes me feel a bit old and sad if that were the case. Not really though, because whilst I find them to be male and I find them sexually exciting to play, they are not humans. I suppose though my soul mate would be a potential lover I feel as connected to as I do one of the boys.

What do you mean when you say that they're "not always friendly"?

Well an example would be the song Mouth Port. I thought for a long time that I can't say "fuck" so much if I want to be on the radio, even though that was the lyric that came to me. So I tried changing it, I think to "spark" or "rush" or something, and the song reacted in an unfriendly way. I would forget the words, I would play the wrong notes. The song would not volunteer for set-lists. I changed it back and it's probably the song I find easiest to play and play most often. Keeping Luff is another, this boy refers to my best friend as a bitch. I knew this would go down badly, but that's how the boy looked when I met him and who am I to say "Well I need to cut your hair before you come to my show"? That would make me the unfriendly one.

Your list of influences includes, amongst others, Björk, Madonna and Sinéad O'Connor - strong women with distinctive visual identities and a talent for constant reinvention. What's the appeal?

Aside from the obvious camp appeal strong women have generally to gay men, it is their artistry: how their visual identity helps explain their music. I always love what Jarvis Cocker wears, and Sophie Ellis Bextor, but it does not take me to a deeper understanding of what they are doing musically, that is the difference for me with these examples. Sinéad uses a lot of history and mythology in her lyrics. I try to do this. Björk is a total musical genius, I hope one day to write an album that gives Homogenic a run for its money. I could never in a million years be as cool as Madonna, thats why I like her, but they have things in common too.

Homogenic is one of my favourite albums as well. Such a raw, elemental collection of songs that seems as rooted in landscape as human emotion. Maybe I'm being fanciful, but it always seems a much more "Icelandic" album than her others. Is Iceland somewhere that interests you as a place?

Iceland interested me in the first instance because of Björk, rather than listening to her due to an interest in the country. However, since then I have gone on to study a lot of its folklore, which I find amazing. It's not all shit morality fiction, some of it is quite aggressive. I am not very well travelled at all, sadly. It's one of lots of places I would like to go. Romania and Germany are other big ones.

From the pictures I've seen, your own visual identity covers quite a wide spectrum: from Celtic warrior via preppy student to Barbarella-style space pirate. Does this feel like part of the same creative process as making music, or is it something completely different?

Not at all. Very different indeed. A boy will have been played a hundred times before I have any idea what he looks like. How to represent something visually takes me a lot of thought, plus it is at the mercy of my own tastes. I am a bit of a clothes whore. How to represent something sonically comes much more naturally and I try not to mess too much with an initial idea, regardless of my liking or disliking of it. It can be a lot of fun though. The idea of being a space pirate rather pleases me!

You say you've been inspired by the cities you've visited. Which city has made the greatest impact on you?

Portsmouth, where I grew up, has certainly influenced my interest in all things nautical and naval, themes which come up in each boy at least once. The Brighton gay scene has influenced me a lot. I moved there when I was eighteen. All the exhibitionism! London does not influence the boys as much as what I decide to do with them. Though I have only been to Cornwall once (and for a short while) I wrote three songs about it. The ancient turkish city Ephesus is also responsible for one.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean about London. Is this related to you having moved here recently?

Well, Brighton and Portsmouth I think affected the boys themselves. Certain places I have been hanging out recently, and people I have met, influence more in the way of who I show the boys to, where I take the boys, how I go about getting the boys noticed by people. It has certainly made me more proactive. But then it would, Brighton is so small.

Read any good books recently?

Lots. I have worked for three bookshops over the last four years. Reinaldo Arenas was my most recent bender. I read three of his in a row. They are all out of print now so not so easy to get hold of, but if you can do... beautifulness!

Tell us about "the lunatics I seem to end up courting" (a quote from your MySpace page) and how they've influenced your music.

The thought of somebody - lunatic or otherwise - knowing I am singing about them rather bothers me, so this has influenced my way of addressing things sideways. Romance given or taken will always produce boys. Gladiators was hard for me to write and is still hard for me to sing.

One of your lyrics bemoans the fact that "I can't source any love" - is love a commodity?

In this boy, yes. It is all about recycling. If you are not given love from someone, to love them back you must use up your natural resources, and that is when emotional global warming happens.

You mentioned in a radio interview that Vessel And Machine was inspired by a Tomi Ungerer picture. Which other visual art inspires you?

Fashion. it is hard to be a showman when you are sat behind an instrument bigger than you are, so I try to keep an eye on that. The photography of Sarah Maple recently inspired my London Mer Gentry project. Like yourself, people were confused about the concept of "boys" so I thought... fuck it, lets dress up as the songs then stand in a big line and point rudely at the camera like Sarah Maples does. Some sleeve design and art work is as narrative as the record itself, so I always examine that.

The London Mer Gentry picture on your MySpace page is fabulous. It's the one I've been pointing people towards when I've mentioned in passing that I'm interviewing you. Would it be too trainspotter-ish to ask which outfit goes with which song?

Well, the Michael character is not song specific. He is there to represent the channel of the other three. The becardiganed character is the embodiment of the fact that as well as a dedication to the craft of musicianship, I want a big house and young girls to fancy me and to do sparkly shows regardless. He is a bit of a piss-take. He is also songs about lovers like Vessel and Gladiators and Little Gun. The helmet character is historical and songs like Oh Dear Vladimir and Just Be Right On and Lord Ronald. The aggressor club kid character is "oh, that's what I should have said" type of songs, like Gladiators and Credit For Daddy and Keeping Luff.

Where do you see your music going next? You've said that you feel more lyrical than musical, though you've become more confident musically as time has passed. Do you have any grand ambitions for a more sumptuous sound, or would you prefer to keep things simple?

There are a lot of things I would still like to do. If I had the time and money, I would buy, learn and write with synthesizers, accordian, hammond organ, wurlitzers and so forth - of course, doing the skeleton of each boy on the harp still. But I do not have any of those things and I struggle with the idea of having other musicians involved with something with my name on it. Also, I do not like the idea of tampering with a boy's DNA too much. On the other hand, I think Some Strings Attached proved that songs can be executed well enough with just a harp and a voice. This is why a record label would be nice. I could arse around for hours with all sorts. This is why I moved from Brighton to London, though that does not sound so logical.

You say you're wary of involving other musicians, yet clearly most of the artists whose work you love (e.g. Björk) manage to involve other people without diluting their own sense of identity. Do you think this is just down to a lack of confidence on your part (maybe about losing control) because you've only ever worked on your own musically, or is it more a point of principle that the only channel for the boys to enter the world is via you?

I think bits of both. The fact that I have not done it before, of course, does not help. Were I to work with other people, I know I would at least feel better about it... not necessarily change my mind, but feel better. I think in the early days I just got too fed up with people telling me I should play guitar and write songs about how much I love women. It's weird, that whole thing is totally arrogant and disgusting of me but also comes from a total lack of confidence. To write with someone means them seeing you playing the same four bars for half an hour before you get it right.

When & where are your next live performances? Do you have any plans to record new material?

I chose a really bad time of year to move city and book shows, so sadly no shows at the moment. I am in negotiations with the Ginglik [a club in Shepherds Bush] and also hoping my teacher will invite me to play at his yearly charity concert at St George's Church in Brighton. There are eleven boys to record, ten of which were written since Some Strings Attached. One of them is older, but did not really fit that record. This comes back to my "other musician" quandry. I would hate to look back on something and think I was not bold enough...

Whatever short-term obstacles life might happen to throw in the way of booking more gigs or recording a second album's worth of songs, I suspect that lack of courage will not be an issue. Beneath that cool, measured, occasionally self-deprecating exterior clearly lies an uncompromising character of considerable focus and persistence. Hopefully 2008 will see him settling into London and moving forward with his unique brand of creativity. The boys deserve nothing less.

Further reading & listening

• MySpace: Michael McLinn
• SongMeanings: Michael McLinn
• Flickr: live at Monkey Chews on 25 March 2008
• Hydragenic: Seeds And Sparks 2

This interview took place in January 2008 and was originally published in issue 4 of DrunkenWerewolf magazine.