WORD PLAY

Your new album is inspired by Donald Trump, Martin.

Yes. My last two or three albums have been driven by that lunatic, and when he disappeared, I was kind of a loose end, like ‘What the fuck am I gonna do now?’ but then I stumbled across a transcript of his infamous speech from November 2020, which was his attempt to derail the US democratic process.

How do you turn a speech into music?

I was listening to a few old Frank Zappa interviews where he said that somebody had said to him, ‘Why are you writing in such weird time signatures?’ His reply was a lightbulb-going-on moment for me: He said, ‘No human process actually happens in 4/4. If you look at speech, it’s compound time signatures’. I thought, ‘I could take a whole bunch of speech, work out where the stresses are, and transcribe it. I could find a way