The new album has a story and a kind of story about a young guy Travla. Can you tell something about that?
Yes, it is also autobiographical, so it is a story about me, but it is also in the third person because there are some things that happened which are more symbolic in the story later on. So it is conceptual, but it is narrative, a story. I tried to make it as cinematic as possible. Indeed, at this point there are two videos that come, two tracks they have released as singles. The word ‘single’ doesn’t really apply to it anymore, not as far as I am concerned. I am not looking to get a hit single, that’s not my way. We had it with this, but it seems so like 130.000 people have seen one of these videos. It almost seems like we are catching up, that is interesting I think.

Like you said, there is an autobiographic story in it. Can you go deeper into that?
It starts in 1950. We had samples of radio at the beginning, used from 1950. It seemed like London was a very distorted place. Very polluted, recovering from the war, five years after the war. When I grew up, there were many things, many houses and buildings were still leaning this side and that side, because… I have never seen actually photographs of it, but my memory of it is that throughout all the 1950’s, these houses are not have been fixed. The area of Pimlico, central London, they had the same style of houses, as a more expensive area which was called Belgravia (Westminster – Vera), but now it looks very much the same as Belgravia because the houses all look splendid. It wasn’t like that when I was growing up. I was growing up in a world that looked like as if a giant had stepped through Pimlico or a very large child had stepped through it and left all his toys all over the floor. It was how London was and it was very; very polluted, very smoke-filled. So the first track is all about that. It is called ‘People Of The Smoke’. It refers to London as ‘the smoke’. It was a nickname for London. It was reasonable to say: ‘ah you are going up to the smoke’… After that, there are many other tracks that talk about life and the passing of time, because the second track is called ‘These Passing Clouds’. It is an instrumental, about the passing of time. We were in the opposite of the Battersea Power Station, which is made famous in music by Pink Floyd on ‘Animals’. I grew up in the opposite of that, so my view from my bedroom windows as a child was what would become Pink Floyd’s most iconic album cover with the flying pig. I grew up with this. It was ought to change, but it was the biggest plant in Europe. It is huge. You can visit it now, you can travel up inside of one of the chimneys. You can fit somewhere around twenty people inside of the lift and it goes inside it. You can go up and have a sight at the flats where I lived. You can see them very clearly on the other side and they look very small in comparison to the giant which is the power station. But the album goes through many changes, very much aspects of the righteous passage. There is a track called ‘Found And Lost’, that is really about first love.

Of course, as a teenager you grew up over there and love finds its way…
Love finds its way, yes. As a young boy I thought it was going to last forever, but of course… And a musical thing, called ‘Enter The Ring’ deals with my time in Genesis. It has a kind of Genesis feel, four strings guitars and harmonies… ‘Get Me Out!’ really deals with the claustrophobia of being overly controlled in a group situation where it was wonderful at times, but also very difficult. I wanted to turn the band into an extensional force. I knew what was required and some of the times I got cooperation, not always and this – I think – is why there is a track called ‘Get Me Out!’ where we are using the word ‘circus’ which means what was going on in my life at that time, so I wanted to get out of that particular circus. I felt too claustrophobic and being controlled by people in it. I wasn’t allowed to do solo work after I had a hit with ‘Voyage Of The Acolyte’. And ‘Ghost Moon And ‘Living Love’ is really a love song. It is about my wife Jo, about the difficulties we had in the beginning of our relationship, establishing ourselves when there were complications with that. I was married and my manager was about to become my second wife’s husband. So there were these complications in relationships. That’s why we have ‘Circo Inferno’, the next song: again the circus has become all impossible and fighting for survival again in my personal life. And ‘Break Out’ is the next track. It is all about breaking free out of that relationship in order to find a way to something better, which is the situation that I have with Jo. I work with Jo, we travel together. We have a very good marriage. She is not a dilettante, she is very much there for me all the time and that is very important. I get to work with her as well as experience the world. We travel a lot.

Where did you recently travel with her, because I know that your music is influenced by different cultures sometimes?
Well, we just come back from Africa. We were there for eight days. We were in Zimbabwe, then we visited Botswana. We could see Zambia across the Victoria Falls and then we went to South Africa. We went to Cape Town. That’s one of the places we have been to recently. We were also in India, China, lots of places in South America, Scandinavia, Europe, lots of different countries. So we have very widely travelled together. That is very precious.

Indeed, next song is ‘Into The Nightwhale’…
That is taking a leap of fate, jumping into the sea the next tracks. It is a little bit as the Pinnochio story. It really symbolizes the darkest of times and biggest challenges. I haven’t got a copy of the album sleeve yet, but I have something of the same size which is this, if you can see this? It is whales following up the circus, so that is the nightwhale aspect. Once you come through this, if you come out on the other side, finally facing your fears, I would say you come out stronger in facing the leap of fate. I decided to love someone completely. I’ve been very lucky to find somebody like Jo. Then we have ‘Wherever You Are’, which is a love song. It is a rock song, but it is also a love song. It is a paradox, really. A love song and a rock song are usually different things, but I combined the two in this one. Let us say I have split the atom and combined two things that shouldn’t be existing together. ‘Wherever You Are’ is the other thing that has been released as a single with a video and it is probably my favourite song on the album. It is really a song to one person in a way, but it became universal. That’s the thing, that you can do something that is personal and very personal, but then it can become universal too.