Manset seems to be on a mission to bring succour and comfort to his listeners, treating his songs like a balm poured on the angst, suffering and ennui of contemporary society. "My new album's a bit less dark and gloomy," he announces at the start of our interview, "The themes of the songs are tragic, but I think the tone I use is maybe a bit more prophetic. I think I've got a greater distance on things this time round." Le Langage oublié has an elegiac quality to it, nevertheless, being a sort of lament for a lost world. In Manset's eyes this is a world which has been lost over the last decade, as the values the West has based society on for centuries have been swept away by the violence and brutality of TV culture and the collective outpourings of reality programmes. "I feel like we're living this permanent lie," Manset complains, "I'm not saying it's deliberate or anything. I don't think there's anyone behind the whole thing, a person or a group of people who's responsible for circulating this feeling of angst that's getting more and more acute all the time. I think it's happening on an unconscious level. People aren't aware of it. It's like the lid's come off Pandora's box and everything's come spilling out."

Manset is a renowned perfectionist, but even so it has been a long time since his last album release (Jadis et naguère in 1998). But he is eager to explain that it was technical problems, not lack of inspiration, that held things up. "I knew I didn't want to bring out another album in the same vein as Jadis et naguère or La Vallée de la paix," he says, "This time round I really wanted to move things on a bit and start working with digital technology." Manset has always lived in studio autarky, not only assuming the role of singer, songwriter and composer, but also working as producer and sound engineer on his own albums. "Actually, there was an album that should have come out last year," he admits, "but I ended up putting it to one side because of technical problems. The thing is, we're at a very important turning-point right now with the move from analogue to digital recording. There are hardly any analogue recorders left now, in fact. Just about everything's done on Pro Tools these days, but the problem is there's practically no-one out there who's really competent in this new field. So what happened with the new album was I found myself taking on several roles again, working as both recorder and sound engineer. And I have to say, it's a bit tiring at my age to have to go back to scratch like that and learn everything again. It added at least a couple of years' work on to the album. I work with a lot of images so I've been using Photoshop for years and I didn't want to accept that Pro Tools was less efficient than that. The truth is, Pro Tools can do just as many amazing things as Photoshop. The only problem is you can never get anyone to answer the hot line. And even if someone does deign to pick up the phone they've never got the solution to your problem!"

On his new album Manset plunges into the unexplored depths of Pro Tools (the software that rules most studios these days, dominating everything from the recording to the mixing process). "I made a small inroad into the world of electronica on the new album," he says, "which moves things on from the 70s a bit. I used electronica on a couple of tracks like Demain il fera nuit, A un jet de pierre, Quand on perd un ami and Le Langage oublié. Ten or fifteen years ago I'd never have been able to create so many different layers of sound, laying them one over the top of the other, like I did on Jeanne la Folle on the album Long long chemin or Animal on est mal." Creating layers of richly textured sounds, Mans

Thematically speaking, one of the most outstanding songs on Manset's new album is Que ne fus-tu, a reference to his mother. "I have to admit I did have the idea of performing live at some point at the back of my mind," he says "and I wanted to include at least one song like this on the new album, a song that was recorded in one take. What happened was I had four simple lines jotted down on paper and then I sat down, had a fag, and knocked out the song in one go. It's like a trace of what inspirationis – there I was sitting there with nothing and three minutes later I had a song in my hands!"

Que ne fus-tu is a rather bizarre song which attempts to trace the sources of adult pain back to an apparently carefree childhood. "Strangely enough, I realised that on the surface the song seems to say the exact opposite of what it really means. It's funny when language gets shifted from its original meaning like that. In the song I say something very positive, but the weird thing is you get a very different emotional charge from the song. I say 'everything was golden once' but the overriding feel you get from the song is 'Who's responsible for all this angst, this collective pain. Isn't it the fault of something in the heart of the family? Can't you trace it all back to the mother? The zeitgeist today is that you have to find someone to blame for everything. And what do you do when there's no guilty party? I remember my mother singing me to sleep with lullabies and Leconte de Lisle, my aunt playing Chopin. Maybe there are some people in the world who shouldn't be reared on beauty, poetry and happiness, because maybe they'll end up being terrified at the idea of having lost what they once had and never being able to get back to that beatific state. That's the problem with Eden and lost Paradise."

The question of lost paradise is a theme that crops up time and time again on Le Langage oublié, in fact. "I wonder if we could ever go back to the world as it was fifteen years ago," Manset muses, "To be honest, I don't really know if that's possible. But we could at least bring in damage limitation, take action like banning advertising posters and putting greater restrictions on the press as to what images they can use." Television sickens him, contemporary literature bores him and he has little time for modern films either. One of the biggest criticisms he aims at contemporary society is its obsession with 'transparency.' "I don't think it's a good thing to express all the time," Manset insists, "to get into the habit of saying everything you feel to everybody. There are certain questions that don't have answers and that's that. That's the way we've lived for the past five or ten thousand years. But now all of a sudden, over the last decade or so, we've thrown that whole philosophy out the window. These days there has to be an answer to everything – and preferably an answer that can be summed up in a single sentence!"

Manset is a man who believes in radical solutions to radical problems, proposing new modes of behaviour in political life. "Once people have elected their leaders, these leaders should completely withdraw from public life," he declares, "I know the idea sounds absurd, but it's quite simplereally. Once you're elected, you disappear from the public eye. You don't do all this going round markets followed by cameras. You don't give interviews to the press. I think our country would be a lot better off if the system operated like that." Questions on the current state of the French music scene are equally likely to draw his wrath. "I watched the "Victoires de la musique" awards ceremony and it was absolutely awful," he rages, "It was like going back in time thirty years with