Nowadays Grant doesn’t listen to music very much, he prefers reading or silence, ”I’m making music all the time and I’m listening to it when I work,” he states, “so I really love silence, I love being able to read and write in silence.” His inspirations, though, still come from music rather than books, “I tried to write a book, but that’s even harder than writing songs,” he reveals, “it’s very difficult to write prose, I think it would take a phenomenal amount of time to write a book. I once worked on a story for a long time: I researched and started writing it, but then gave it up after six months, though I may come back to it, or I might simply end up having another idea and work on that. I put snatches of what I was writing in poetry form on my website, it’s basically about a priest who finds a gun and becomes obsessed by it. At present, I’m happy to do what I’m doing, if people like it, that’s great, but if they don’t, they can fuck off, it doesn’t really bother me. It’s great to have no expectations, people don’t know what I’m going to do next, I myself don’t know what I’m going to do next and I think that’s a good position to be in. I just live day-to-day and work away, trying to express myself, it’s better than a real job, though it can be mind numbing in its own way and you sometimes might end up staring at a blank page for three hours, but when it works it’s really great and it makes it worthwhile.”

There are no plans for a James Grant tour, even though he recently played in Edinburgh and at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, “I can’t really afford touring,“ he explains, “the record company won’t subsidise it, but I’ll go wherever I’m wanted: if people want me to come and play, I’ll do it, even my fans, if they want me to come and play, I’ll do it. Fans have actually started organising gigs for me which is great.”

There is something James Grant fans can look forward to, a new album, he’s indeed already working on new ideas, “I guess it’s a very cyclical thing, you finish one album, you move onto another,” he states, “especially in these days because you don’t even tend to promote it, so a record comes out and then dies a couple of weeks later and then you have to move to the next one. I’m not sentimental, I’d like more people to hear my music, but if that can’t be done through regular channels, hopefully I can do it in other ways, like I said I’ll go wherever I’m wanted, but without radio play and press and all the rest that goes with it, it’s very difficult for people to know that you even exist.” Since we’re chatting about recording new material I ask him if there is an artist or a producer he would like to collaborate with, “Paul McCartney,” he answers, after a brief pause, “I could probably help him out, I think his music is too happy, I could be his foil, like John Lennon. I could drag his songs into the gutter,“ he laughs, “for what regards producers, I really like the guy who produced The Flaming Lips and The Delgados, Dave Fridmann, he’s really great. I quite like the guy from Talk Talk as well, because he always made good records, maybe such collaborations would be interesting,” he pauses, then laughs again, “but these things are never likely to happen, though you never know…”

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