Up until now your albums have come out with the absolute regularity of a metronome. It's been one every two years, but this time round there's been a gap of four years. Why is that?
My live album* demanded an awful lot of work, you know. I spent ages sorting through the tracks and mixing and choosing the 28 songs for the three albums was a pretty heavy task too. Then you have to factor in the 150 concerts I did on the Qu4tre tour. I really wanted to change things this time round and that meant putting more time in. I wanted to re-jig all the instrumentation and do all the arrangements myself. Up until my fourth album I never bothered with all that, I just looked after the lyrics and the music. But with Qu4tre I tried my hand at all the other stuff on Les Malheurs du Lion and La Chandelle – although I have to say it's a lot of work for one man!

What with arranging, producing, composing and performing, did you ever feel you'd bitten off more than you could chew?
No, but I think that's because everything comes quite naturally. I learnt a lot from Joseph Racaille on my previous albums too. I picked up a huge amount from watching him and following his advice. That's what gave me the confidence to feel I was capable of doing it myself this time round.

Do you really feel the need to be the only driver on board, the only 'architect' involved in constructing your universe?
You can't get away from that sometimes. Sometimes you simply can't delegate things to other people. That was already a bit the case with Qu4tre – I used to step in and take over when things got a bit stuck. I think in those kinds of situation it's up to me to take things in hand. It was the same with the live album too, in fact.

So the apparent simplicity of your songs, the natural flow of ideas and your laidback persona are actually regulated by a very sophisticated system?
I feel the need to be very precise in my thoughts and the flow of ideas. I try my best to get rid of any hint of vagueness – I think vagueness is one of the big problems of our time. We all end up falling into the trap of vagueness because there just seems to be this real lack of vocabulary. It's like sometimes someone tells you something and you end up completely misunderstanding what they're trying to say. You have to admit it's better to be able to say exactly what you think...

Is that where your almost obsessive concern with finding the right word comes from?
Well, I don't actually ‘fine tune’ my texts as much as that! Precision comes quite easily to me really, shaping sentences or getting the right turn of phrase comes fairly naturally... The way I work is I jot ideas down on paper as soon as they come into my head, then I rework them afterwards. I like things to go pretty quickly, although I'm careful not to lose the listener somewhere down the line! You have to maintain a certain coherence to your songwriting even though things sometimes end up sounding a little surreal. But I've never simply stuck ideas together in a haphazard collage where the meaning of the song escapes you. My songs always tell some sort of story.

Do you think that somewhere down the line the extravagant fantasy in your songs gives you the freedom to tackle more serious issues?
No, I don't agree with that. But I've always worked towards putting a humorous and at times whimsical spin on seriousness. I don't want to come across as simply funny.

Guitars are everywhere on this album, producing everything from folky sounds to screaming electric feedback. Is this because you have a particular passion for the instrument or simply because you wanted a change?
Touring can really wear out your enjoyment of things, you know… All I can say is, I reached a point where I knew I really didn't want to do another acoustic album; I wanted a complete change of instrumentation. There was always a bit of guitar on my old albums, but this time round it's a lot more rough and ready. I'd never have done anything like this before, but this time round I found myself turning to a rhythm section. I guess it was my way of saying "OK, I can do the guitar, bass and drums thing too!"

How do you work your music so that it's not just a simple accompaniment to the lyrics?
Well, when I write I think I'm very aware of the musicality of the words. I know immediately when a phrase sounds right. My songs are never completely 'finished' – if they were, they'd sound too rigid, they'd sound wrong even in terms of metre. Generally, the way I work is I look for music to fit the musicality of the lyrics. It's rare for me to come up with the music before the words of a song. I've always worked that way, but I have to say that working on the last two albums I've tended to reverse that trend.

Where does your rather strange album title - Pièce Montée des Grands Jours (An Ornamental Cake for Special Occasions) – come from?
Food's a recurrent theme on this album really; it's linked to the wonderful sense of metaphor in the French language. When I started work on the album I'd vaguely thought of writing about food, then when the first couple of songs turned out with food themes I made a conscious decision to orient the rest that way too. The title goes way back to my own family history. I had this aunt who'd always go to the hairdresser's before family dinners and she'd turn up with this absolutely frightful hair-do. And we'd always sit round and laugh about it, going "Here comes the ornamental cake for special occasions!"

But what's the link between ornamental cakes and the pig's head on your album cover?
Well, I couldn't stick a picture of a cake on the cover, could I? Besides, Mondino never illustrates his subjects directly. He's the one who came up with the idea of the pig's head, in fact. I was a bit bothered about it to start with, because I've made a real effort to get away from animal metaphors and it was like oh no! here's another one. At the same time I like the idea of there being a certain continuity between my album covers.

Is being pictured on your album covers a bit like becoming the subject of your own songs?
Mondino's the only person I can work this way with. I simply give him the album title and he takes if from there. He's brilliant at working like that. Everything goes very quickly, in fact. Mondino turns up, takes a look, comes up with an idea, then goes away and faxes me three or four sketches. These creative moments are great fun, but they also result in absolute quality images. This time round, for the first time, we kept what he'd planned. Normally, what happens is he invents one on the spot and we end up keeping that. With Les Ronds de Carottes the original idea was to have me sitting in an armchair and with Le Jour du Poisson he'd planned to stick a fish on my tie. It was the same with Qu4tre where the image we'd originally planned for the album cover ended up in the booklet inside – that's the photo of me lying down next to the horse! Mondino had actually planned a lot of other things which were a lot trashier. There was this one image of me sitting there with a bare chest with this string of sausages round my neck; and there's one sticking up on my shoulder like a penis! It's a great image but it's a bit too strong for the music world – it would be better suited to the art world!

You recorded the title track of your new album, Pièce Montée des Grands Jours, as a duet with Marie Trintignant. How did this collaboration come about?
I asked Marie to come along to the studio one day when I was doing this radio show to sing Je Suis Dev’nueLa Bonne. I'd always thought my songs would really suit her persona – and that one certainly did, but we never had any concrete plans to work together. But I went on to write several songs she ended up doing. In this case, Pièce Montée des Grands Jours would have been very complicate