'I've brought the machine ," says Jamie Lidell , finishing off a large plate of Eggs Benedict at the studio cafe. There is a well-travelled suitcase at his feet. "I have mine too," I say, nodding at my bulging, body-shaped luggage. We then head off to a sound-proof room. Only among musicians could this behaviour be considered entirely without suspicion. Anyone else would worry things were going to get a bit medieval.
Safely in our padded cell, the technology comes out. It looks like the scene in James Bond movies where Q says: "Now pay attention, 007." The "machine" is what turns the sound of Jamie and his microphone from one voice into a choir of soul singers and a stage full of jamming musicians. It is a combination of old and new equipment - and a lot of wires. The computer side of it he devised himself after taking a couple of years out of music to immerse himself in a program called Max/Msp, which allows you to build your own "virtual" instruments from scratch.
"It's just a looping thing, really - but so much fun! It's all about learning how to move in and out of the music, construct something. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't." He launches in to a bit of scat singing: "Skoot de gat de skoot de gat . . . right, that's the beat, do I scrap that or carry on? Mind you, don't stop looking at the audience and don't forget to think about the next tack. You are in the past, present and the future, all at the same time."
It's taking care of the audience, creating some theatre, that makes Lidell's show so captivating. He's the antithesis of the "look at me, I'm emailing" laptop musicians, strutting around in his fancy suits. (One is made of cassette tape, and makes him look like a shiny yeti.)
The machine is ready. I stick a microphone in the trombone, so I can play it through my machine - echoes, reverbs and other effects. Jamie takes all those sounds and feeds them in to the laptop. He can then grab bits of what I play - and thoroughly mess them up.
And he's off: starting with beats and bass lines - foundations for a tune, vocal impressions of instruments. Jamie dances on the chair, as if he is trying to get outside himself. He looms and zooms in and out of the machines, cloning the various sounds until the room is busy with different versions of the two of us - backwards, slowed down, cut up into tiny chunks.
His voice is a shock: Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye and Prince coming out of one mouth. "I get a lot of questions like: 'Are you allowed to do this as a white guy?' My response now is: would you stop a black American singer doing opera? There's a stupidity in the question. It means you can't do jazz if you are white. You can't do funk. You know, fuck that. Music doesn't grow with that attitude."
But there's another side to Lidell's latest CD that, for some, makes him a double agent. Multiply (a collaboration with musicians Chilly Gonzales and Mocky) basks in its own sunshine - an effort to get away from darker music. He was no longer hearing music that he wanted to get up and put on in the morning.
That joyous voice has always wanted to be heard. At secondary school, Lidell remembers scat singing at the front of the class for his music teacher. "He was a total maverick. He got a jazz band to come and play for assembly, and said he wanted me to jam with them. I said, yeah, I'm down. Fresh! I got a lot of flack for that - all the other kids coming up to me and saying like, 'You're the scat singing bloke, doo bee doo'. I just said: fuck it, I love it man. But then he got fired. I think they thought he was a nutter. He used to sleep over in the music room. But he was a cool guy."
So what took him to the dark side? "I had my sampler and stuff when I was 16. I did a rave - played with Prodigy in Brighton. I didn't know shit really. This guy came over and said, 'Oh, you got a sampler? Right, I'm coming over your house'. He was a bit of a dodgy geezer and my mum was like, 'What's going on?' A real pill-head. He brought his breakbeat records and showed me how it works - he showed me the rave style and I thought, yeah, I can do that. Then I got a computer, just pottered along."
Back at the cafe, sitting outside, Jamie reflects on the trouble with being happy.
"Multiply is too sweet for some. But I've seen so many clubs and buttons and laptops. It's getting to the point where you just don't know what people are doing any more. You just have to fart in to a mic and put it through 100 plug-ins and you're a pioneer. Don't get me wrong, I like mashing up the sound now and again, and in a way, doing Multiply I had to avoid certain . . . pleasures . . . if you like. I have plenty of negative shit, and it would be easy to make dark music."
He looks up in to the sun and raises his beer: "But I was determined, this time, to concentrate on the good."
