The line-up of artists on Ed's new album is more eclectic than a Portobello Road junk shop. With everyone from Skunk Anansie's Skin to So Solid's Harvey to Saffron from Republica contributing, we caught up with Ed to find how he put together such a fantastic guestlist...

I find Ed relaxing in a studio at Sony's London HQ. He's been doing interviews all day and I'm the last one in. Expecting him to be strung out and stressed after talking to dance music hacks for hours on end, I find him surprisingly relaxed and pleased to see me. 'I'm used to it' he tells me, 'I got a lot of press with 'Who?' last year so I don't really get fazed by all this stuff anymore.' Ed's been making UK Garage since before the scene's explosion, early tracks like 'Love City' with Donna Cousins were huge even when the scene was still tiny and he narrowly avoided having a major hit with 'It's Love' featuring Filo. 'It would have been huge, it did get signed, but the person who signed it left the label and...well...nothing happened. People still come up to me about that, it will come out, we are getting it back from the label...I think it'll still go, it's just funny how things work out sometimes.'

Ed doesn't strike you as the kind of person who gets bitter about things. He carried on producing and working with artists, but it wasn't until 'Something In Your Eyes' that Ed started to get some serious attention from the majors...'It would have been a much bigger track if any of the copies had actually had bar codes on!' Ed jokes, but barcodes or not the track was an underground hit. Ed went on to enjoy commercial success with 'Who?' and has now come up with a UK Garage album project quite different from anything released before. 'The dust has settled since the explosion of Garage last year' Ed muses, 'it's on the same kind of level as House and R&B in the UK now. The MC thing is taking a whole new direction once again, not so much the club angle but focusing more on the lyrics. When I started House and Garage was the same thing, now it's split up and even Garage is splitting up, it happens to all music. It's about pushing the boundaries, trying to do something alternative. I caught different vibes in the studio with different artists and I'm not afraid to put out different musics, it's mostly Garage on the album but we've worked with people from other scenes.'

The first single from the album is collaboration with Skin (formerly of Skunk Anansie), somebody totally removed from the Garage scene, but the end result is a credible and fantastic piece of music pitching UK Garage to a completely different audience; an audience that buys albums. 'She had heard what I was doing before' Ed tells me when I ask him how he linked up with her, 'I sent her a show reel a while back, I approached her about the album; she was at a natural break in her career and she wanted to do it. I felt the end result was something really special. I tried to make a record that will appeal to all kinds of people, a lot of older Garage heads listen to House now, a lot of younger people are getting into Garage, hopefully there is something on the album that everyone can appreciate.'

As well as Skin, Ed has collaborated with Harvey, Ms Dynamite, Elizabeth Troy, Shawn Escoffery, Ming Xia (from the Spooks), Robbie Craig and Republica's Saffron. 'I'm a producer not an artist' says Ed, 'It's different, to get recognition as a producer I had to use artists as well. I don't want people to think that I got all these people to work with me just because I'm signed to a major, most of them I'd done work with before. Columbia wanted me to work with Destiny's Child, in the end it didn't happen but we got Ming Xia from the Spooks, she's blazing! My friend Joel linked me up with Saffron, he played guitar on a few tracks on my album...I was like...No! Saffron! Really!!! She was really cool...just like; 'Collaborate? Sure! I'll come down next week!' I mean, she's like, a rock-star! We went a bit different on that track, its closer to Big Beat as opposed to Garage, I've been getting nervous about the album over the last few weeks, thinking maybe it's not mainstream enough...(He pauses)...but I believe in it, hopefully the music will speak for itself. It might have been better to do an album a year ago but I think what I've done on this album will last a lot longer than what I'd have done then. I would have had an album of MCing. Four years ago it wasn't possible for people like me to get album deals with the majors; Albums are still a new thing to the UK Garage scene. It's great it's finally happening, I mean, Sony are going to be able to get out a lot more copies than I could from the back of my mum's car! (laughs) which is what I was doing for five or six years...I'm lucky, I've got everything to gain at the moment.'

Ed's Guestlist is released July 1st, the single 'Good Times' feat. Skin is out 17th June.