You seem a bit obsessed with "fast food" on your new album, Cyclone. There's a song where you refer to "dreams haunted by a lingering smell of hamburgers" and another where you talk about munching on "takeaway burgers". What next? A duet with (ecological activist) José Bové?
I'd say everyone's fighting the same battle, but on their own territory! The thing is, the word hamburger has become part of our everyday language. I was really careful before to avoid using any kind of repetition in my lyrics. I didn't like repeating the same word twice in one song let alone on an entire album! But my attitude's changed lately. With my last two albums I've decided what's important is to pick up on the obsession of the day. And for me, hamburgers are not just food they're representative of today's whole fast-food lifestyle.

But, hamburgers aside, the songs on your new album do seem to put across a certain message against globalization …
Yes, that's true. I've always felt strongly about issues like this, but it's only now that people are really bringing things out in the open and talking about them. To be honest, I wasn't trying to have one central theme running through the album. When I sit down to write I just follow my inspiration. What generally happens when I'm working on an album is I get around thirty songs together and then I whittle these down as I go along. That way the album has a much more coherent feel to it at the end of the day. You obviously get this coherent feel through the music, but the themes of the songs play a major role too. So you do end up with some kind of message running through the album. But it's not a message you've sat down and thought about before you started - it's something which comes out as you're working.

And what were you trying to get at on your new album musically speaking?
I wanted something which sounded a lot rawer and more electric than my previous work. I wanted Cyclone, to have a strong 'live' feel to it. As far as the themes on the new album go, I'm not really tackling anything new. I'm just bringing things up to date. I don't feel my work is stuck in one particular period - in fact, I think it's more a case of the times catching up with me!

Would you describe yourself more as an activist or a poet?
I'm an activist but I'm not someone who goes out trying to convert other people to my cause. I mean, I can deal with the idea of being wrong about something, but I wouldn't want to be responsible for other people being wrong about something. I think of myself as being in tune with those who are sensitive to the same issues as me, people who have the same concerns as I do but who don't necessarily know how to address them. I've been criticised in the past for not being enough of a media figure. But I don't want to be a media figure - I'm afraid I'd be manipulated in some way. I hate the way people and issues are treated in the media. I haven't really worked out a good strategy for dealing with the media, but I have a lot of admiration and respect for someone like Cohn-Bendit (the Green European MP). He manages not to get sucked into it somehow.

The lyrics to the song Classe prolo seem to correspond much more to the lifestyle you had when you were with Starshooter, than the success you've enjoyed with your solo career since. Do you think you could have written the same kind of song back then?
No, I wouldn't have felt comfortable with it. Back in the Starshooter days I wrote songs like Inoxydable and C'est le week-end - songs which said the kind of things you say about the working classes when you're 18. But these days I take a very different approach to the whole subject. I'm a singer who's had a lots of ups and downs career-wise. When I'm going through a good period I get to hob-knob with the jet-set, but when I'm going through a bad period I don't belong to that world at all! Because of where I come from, I feel a lot closer to the working classes than the aristocracy. Basically, I wrote the song Classe prolo because I got worked up about the idea that when words go out of fashion, people think the problems have gone away too. Nobody talks about 'the proletariat' these days. The word's become obsolete because it was linked to communism and communism doesn't exist any more. We live in a very different kind of society these days where more people belong to the middle classes. So we go round thinking 'the proletariat' - the working classes - don't exist any more. The new economy promises 'success for everyone', but some people are still being paid absolute peanuts while others are getting laid off from factories and being treated like shit.

You seem to be a bit nostalgic for the working-class culture of the old days. What do you think about rap?
I think rap is the real protest music of today. I like the message rappers put across, but I don't always agree with their goals, you know, when all they want to end up doing is driving round in BMWs wearing gold chains … That's certainly not my vision of the world! In a way, the issues I raise on Cyclone are a kind of response to rap. Basically, I think there should be more than one vision of how to get on in the world when you come from a poor background. I like the attitude of rap groups when they come out with their first album. They're generally very sincere and the picture they paint of today's society is really spot-on. But, if they make it big, their attitude starts to change. After that, rappers are in it for the money. They stop trying to fight the system where the rich get richer and end up trying to be one of the rich getting richer instead. It's about as stupid as the proletariat's idea of dictatorship!

Is the song Manhattan your idea of the ideal city?
Yes, it is really. It's a bit like Henri Salvador's Syracuse - something beautiful you're striving towards. It can fire you with the will to live, to keep on going … Manhattan is an ideal of being, rather than having.
When you launched your own career after Starshooter you turned towards a style of 'acoustic rock chanson', whereas other singers like Jean-Louis Aubert (former lead singer of Téléphone) continued in the same musical vein as before. Was Aubert an example of what you didn't want to do?
When I launched my own career I wanted to get involved in other kinds of musical adventures. Aubert did exactly what he wanted, carrying on with exactly the same style of music he'd been doing with Téléphone and maybe taking it a little further, but frankly not much. Aubert's a rock man, that's all there is to it. Personally, I felt there was a lot more to my life than rock!

After Starshooter you went on to record three solo albums - between 1983 and 1988 - but they all sank without a trace. You've described this period as a totally depressing time in your life. What was the hardest thing about it?
After Starshooter I got into the idea of doing French "chanson", taking Aznavour, early Gainsbourg and Brel as my reference points … I felt like this whole genre had been completely abandoned. And the reason I got depressed was tied up with the fact that nobody was really interested in what I was trying to do. People tried to get me to give up "chanson" and do something else instead. Then the months went by and I found my career going down the drain - my records weren't in the stores any more, my songs weren't played on the radio… I felt like I'd spent five whole years working for nothing. I felt completely worn out and exhausted and I was singing really badly too. It got to the point where I just didn't believe in myself any more.

You've had a very eclectic career, composing songs, writing books and even drawing comic strips at one point. Are these activities as diverse as they seem or have you found there are certain similarities in the creative process?
No, I don't think they actually have anything in common at all. One minute I'm working away in one genre and the next minute I feel like I've got to break out of it. After a long stretch of doing music, I'll feel like writing a novel. But then when I finish the novel I get the urge to jump up on stage and start performing again!

In the course of your career you've also written material for other singers - I'm thinking of people like Enzo Enzo, Michel Fugain, Johnny Hallyday and Zazie, for instance. What do you get out of writing for other people?
Well, if it was me asking to write for other people, I'd have to adapt myself to them. But what's happened with the singers you mentioned is they came to me and asked me to write stuff for them along the same lines as I do for myself. I'm not really a songwriter 'for hire' - I write songs when other people come and ask me to. The thing is, I can't write to order. I've got to meet the other person first and find out what they really want from me … Writing songs for other people looks good on my CV, but it doesn't ever make that much of an impression on me! These days I'm not really interested in writing for other people - unless I get to do the music as well as the lyrics. I'd be more interested in doing some kind of long-term collaboration I think.

>It felt like you were moving towards a more electro sound on your last album, Métropolitain, but your new album marks a return to a more classic style. Was this a purely impulsive act on your part?
I felt like doing this album and I did it - that's all there is to it! My record company, Barclay, was really against the idea to start with. They didn't understand why I wanted to 'harm my image' putting out an album like this, especially after I'd just done a joint show with Enzo Enzo which took me away from my solo career. But the thing is, it gets really boring putting out the same kind of records all the time. I want to have fun with what I'm doing. Music offers such a huge range of possibilities and I feel like I'm only doing a quarter of what I could be. Basically, I feel it's time that changed!