Cutler’s artistic career started with a gig at the Blue Angel in Islington in 1957, which he reckoned was "an unmitigated failure". In the 60s he became a popular figure on UK radio, and in 1961 released his first record, the "Of Y’Hup" EP. In 1967 he appeared in The Beatles’ "Magical Mystery Tour" film as Buster Bloodvessel, subsequently recording a jazz trio album called "Ludo" for Parlophone. In the 70s he recorded a number of albums of poetry and music for the newly emerged Virgin label and later for Rough Trade.

Cutler began writing poetry in the mid 60s, "out of curiosity", though he maintains that it took him about six years before he was any good at it. He has published numerous books including "Gruts" and "Life In A Scotch Sitting Room". John Peel has consistently championed his work, resulting in dozens of radio sessions of spoken word and music since 1970. He is now signed to Creation Records who have just released his new album "A Wet Handle". The Jukebox took place at the label’s North London offices.

[due to a misfunctioning hi-fi, the CD plays silently for 20 seconds before two piano notes come through. I stop it immediately to re-cue] Ah, hold on, don’t play any more. That sounds like Thelonius. That’s amazing.

I am. I love him dearly.

I think I need another bar or two. [The track continues] Oh boy. You can play as much as you like of this.

Oh, well I wouldn’t have known that. I’d be too proud to say a thing like that. A lot of people still like this work and rightly so. It give’s you hope for the world. Wasn’t that funny!

I did a thing recently on Radio 3 [a recording of poems from "A Wet Handle"] and in the spaces in between when they were doing something I would sit down at the piano – the harmonium is my usual instrument – and I would start and play a bit of jazz. It was a great piano. I discovered I was doing quite a nice thing. They would only be quite short. I thought: Hey not bad Cutler! But I’m not quite sure if I was to do a long piece, it wouldn’t start to diminish.

Well, I’ve done the odd warm up, and I did one with Soft Machine at the Royal Albert Hall with Robert Wyatt on the drums. He and I became very big friends.

Yes, that’s right. I wasn’t taken with early jazz music, although I’ve come back since to people who in their own quiet way have a great perfection to what they do. But I was more into [Monk] and Keith Jarret when he came out. I’m not really a making-it-up-as-you-go-along type. I’m a simple man. [laughs] I see myself as simple.

When I was fifteen I thought, "I’m going to be a composer. I’m going to make simple but strong melodies like Drove or Schubert." I’ve got a thing which I call my first Piano Concerto and it’s only in three lines [laughs], because I didn’t know what a concerto was. I took it to school and showed it to the music teacher and she was knocked out. It was a load of rubbish. Then I did a serious one called "Funeral Bells", because being a humourist I’m naturally a lugubrious kind of bloke, and suicide always has a big attraction to guys like me.

I didn’t settle down to really composing until I was 34. I was a schoolteacher, I had a wife and a couple of kids. I wanted to be a painter and I thought I wouldn’t be able to leave teaching because I needed the money. So I thought, "I’ll compose a song and somebody else can sing it and I’ll just cash in on it. and then I’ll be able leave teaching". Pathetic, isn’t it? For about three years I wrote songs and went around to Tin Pan Alley and gave about three songs to each person with a stamped addressed envelope. They’d send them back in a couple of weeks so they wouldn’t hurt my feelings.

One day I went into a place called Box & Cox and the boss man there was a fellow called Boxy. I was dressed up all peculiar, a big bag on my back with paintings in it and a dirty old duffel coat. I put on a deadpan voice and said, "I understand you buy songs here." He said, "Yes", carefully. I said, "Would you like me to sing one of my songs for you?" He said, "Yes", it was five o’clock in the evening, he had a fire going, he was relaxing. So he got one or two of his chums and pointed to a piano that was against the wall and he sat behind me. I said "I’ve got different songs. It could be a funny one or it could be a serious one." He said, "Oh, play what you like." So I sat down and played this funny one. After a while I was listening, I heard [mimics the sounds of spluttering, held-in laughter]. I carried on to the end, turned around, and Box was lying on the floor, his face purple. I said, "It’s OK, you can laugh." He said, "We get some funny people in here and they would be terribly hurt if we laughed, because they see themselves as being very serious." So he took me on and started me in my music career.

[After a couple of minutes] I’ve had as much as I want to listen to. I presume it goes on like that? Well it doesn’t communicate with me. There’s nothing there for me.

[surprised] Oh, Cecil Taylor. I thought it was some kind of poetry. But if I’ve to listen to Cecil Taylor he’d have to play an instrument.

When I started writing poetry I thought that because I’d mead my name on the radio with both my songs and my stories, I could do it and I could just walk into poetry and it would be OK. I wonder if Cecil Taylor had been working long enough in poetry. But I think probably the easiest thing to say would be it’s a matter of taste. I’ve more or less given up reading poetry. I read natural history instead and get more of a buzz there.

My way of writing poetry was to go to a jazz concert and just let the music come through me and just write nonsense poems, so that one was listening to the noise of the words rather than the meaning. I wouldn’t allow my intellect to get in the way. After six years I found certain sounds more to my taste than others and I gradually began to use actual words.

I found that very intellectual and not to be regarded by me. It’s like people calling me a surrealist. I’m not. I’m halfway between realism and surrealism. I usually wake up in the middle of the night and I reach out for the pen and the book. I wait and a couple of words come from nowhere, out my head, and I write them down. Usually the intellect wakes up and wants to get into the act. It says: you’ll never make a poem out of these two words. I know from bitter experience that’s how I start, then other words come into my head and I keep on going. I don’t change words, I just go through to the end then I put it back and go to sleep. Then I wake up in the morning and have a read. Usually – because I’ve got quite good at it now – it’s good enough to be in the next collection.

You’ve hit gold there. I studied African drumming for four years. It’s a pity that the voice is there because it’s the background. . . I’ve been very interested in African music, well World Music really, but African was probably the first that grabbed hold of me. I used to invite friends round and give them each something to hit, but very different from one another, so you got a lot of crossing rhythms, that and the texture and so on. And after you’d done that you could just sort of go off on your own and we’d listen to one another. Very exciting.

[referring to the track we are listening to] The way they can cross their rhythms dead subtle. There’s a change of rhythm there. It’s going in threes then going in fours and they just slip it in.

I used to do a 15 minute programme on Radio 4 and I could choose whatever I liked and I would always put some African stuff in and Gaelic song and slow Irish airs – I don’t mean ‘Danny Boy’ [laughs].

The New Statesman said: ‘The Ewe tribe [from Ghana] will be performing drumming this Saturday outside Imperial College.’ There were nine of these people in their costume. One started playing the double bells, that’s like two ice cream cones joined at the bottom, made of iron. They were an octave apart. Then the next one came in with these beads around a gourd, then another drummer and so on. And everyone had a different instrument, until the nine of them were all playing. You could hear all the crossing rhythms. Oh boy! Then after they’d been going for a bit, number nine dropped off, then number eight and you could see the bones. It’s rather like listening to chamber music, because you can see the bones of what’s going on, whereas in an orchestral thing there’s too much going on. There’s too much of the wrong kind of complication.

Oh, that’s my chum. Fascinating voice. Very difficult for me, knowing him as well as I do, to discuss it. He’s the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. After I’ve had a session with him I’ve got to wait a fortnight before I can go back again because my brain has got to digest all that took place.

I find it difficult to hear the words. I don’t know. I just enjoy the quality of the noise that’s being made. On "Rock Bottom" [Wyatt’s second solo album from 74], there’s a poem [at the end of "Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road"] and a lot of people thought I wrote the words. It’s nothing at all like the way I write words. I didn’t feel much sympathy with the words and the communication, and that's perhaps where I enjoy this more for the music – the music of the words and the music of the music.

Well, I suppose I was around strutting my stuff [bursts out laughing]. I suppose my name was around because I did the odd bit of telly and the odd bit of radio. Fortunately my ego needs – which are not totally absent – are not the kind of ego needs that have me striving to be top of the pile.

The thing that drives me nuts is a lot of the fans that I have – because of Peel, I think, or because of the taste of the day – are people who go home and play very loud music in their homes, and they go in their motor cars playing very loud music with the windows open. Then they come to my gigs and I play as quiet as I can get away with because that’s how I want to communicate it. I think, "I ought not to let these people in if they play loud music." Maybe I should stand at the door and you have to fill in a questionnaire before you can hear me.

[before the track starts] You’ve obviously done your homework and I’m delighted. Have you any idea why people love to listen to very loud music?

And the way it gets inside your body. But that’s rather like fucking. . . Oh! [he gives an embarrassed glance at the tape player I am using to record the interview]. Well, if a guy hangs onto a chandelier and drops smack onto the woman in order to have intercourse with her, that’s rather like loud music. If one is tender and gentle and appreciates the woman in a way that makes her feel respected, and makes her glow or grow or whatever, that’s the way I am with music.

[The track starts. After a short while:] Sounds good. I’m doing a piece for the radio called "Nothing". They got a lot of people to talk about nothing, and they put me in because they’ve got all these intellectual guys doing their thing – scientists, I suppose. [Referring to the track] it’s mostly silence?

Well, I don’t need to hear anymore. I’ve got a lot of respect for John Cage. I think he was seminal. I’m sure he was a tremendous influence on a lot of people. He was not without a sense of humour. He might even have influenced me in that the first play I did for [Radio 3 producer] Piers Plowright was called "Silence", and I used a lot of silence in it. And in one of the other plays I did there was silence for I think it was 46 seconds. Piers Plowright went up to Edinburgh for a meeting of producers and this guy stands up and says, "Ivor Cutler did this play and there were 46 seconds of silence. He used up all that precious time". [laughs] Piers was hugging himself because he likes silence as well. Silence is great stuff. If people, instead of listening to stuff just switched off and listened. . . Of course there isn’t silence, there’s tons going on all the time.

Well, that’s a positive act. He was sitting there, not playing a symphony or whatever. I got hold of a book [by Cage] once and I was amazed at the intelligence of the man. I used to go a lot to the modern ballet. There was an American [ballet] group, and Cage used to write for them. Once he stood at the side of the stage telling jokes and the ballet dancers would move along as the jokes were being told. It worked a treat.

Yes, for years and years, it makes my life a great misery, noises. I always carry earplugs with me.

[Chuckles] It falls between stools. It has a nice simplicity but there isn’t a great deal of subtlety. It’s a 12-bar thing.

I haven’t a clue.

So it’s a Beatles job. Well I never. Too bad. [laughs] I’ve no memory of that at all. I do remember others.

McCartney heard a song that I sang, "I’m Going In A Field": "I lie beside the grass." I love that line. People are wondering [whispers], "What’s he on about?" He heard it, got in touch with me and invited me along for a meal and asked me about it. He said "You know there’s that chord in that song." I said, "Oh yeah, it’s a major second." Anyway about six months later I got invited to be in Magical Mystery Tour and I discovered I was known by Lennon.

Nobody wrote it. I just kind of made it up as I went along. But they would ask me – if you remember the spaghetti scene: "Ivor would you?" I said, "Yeah." Then the love scene with the fat woman. Not fat. She wasn’t thin either. Running across the sand having a kind of love tryst thing. I didn’t get much direction, but I suppose I was able to acquit myself.

Is that it? That one was fascinating, because it had a simplicity, but the way the voices were being used were very folk song and they didn’t sound that English. It sounded somewhere in Europe.

Was that Ginsberg singing? Ginsberg was a Jew, and it had that Jewish quality and the kind of rhythms of it. I’m a Jew. I’m a Jew because I stand up to be counted when there’s fascists around. I got John Peel to tell punters that I was a Jew because of a National Front guy [who was a fan] – although Peel didn’t say National Front when he broadcast it, he didn’t want to give them the publicity. He said, "Ivor’s discovered a very right wing guy is a big fan, and he wants him to know that he is a Jew". I felt I’d been raped. [After that] I was waiting for shit to come through the letterbox, and bricks.

I went along to Festival Hall to hear that guy with the dreadlocks, the poet, Benjamin Zephaniah -–great bloke, heart in the right place, good poet. He did his bit and then Ginsberg came on. He started and then he said "Am I loud enough?" Some young kid shouts up, "No." And the engineer brought it way up. I had to leave.

I quite enjoyed one of the beats who did that famous book.

Yes, I enjoyed that very much. It was a long time ago and I was at an age when I could take it on board. But I didn’t get much out of [Ginsberg’s] poetry. [Referring to the song] It’s a very warm, friendly noise, and I think it’s partly Jewish rhythms. In the Passover there are certain songs that Jews sing as they’re going through the Passover meal and they have something of that in them. I suppose that’s why I warmed to it. I don’t think I was too crazy about the words in particular. In a way they were irrelevant for me anyway, but the noise was very nice. I’m sure not to everyone’s taste, but certainly to mine.