Friday’s surge of artistic activity could perhaps be ascribed to the fact that he was busy directing U2’s iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE tour for the last two years. Would he say he was distracted by all the U2 stuff?

“Well you don’t get distracted because the weird thing is I’ve been doing this since forever in a weird way,” he laughs. “We’ve been dealing with each other work-wise and song-wise in that we beat each other up about our work when you play it, just as you do when you’re an 18 year old saying, ‘that’s great but the chorus isn’t good enough!’ That kind of shit has been going on forever.

“Since Joshua Tree, though, I’ve been part of the creative team in working on putting the shows up,” he continues. “This was such an ambitious tour, the pre-production was a lot of work. There was time-out where you’re not here for a couple of months but I knew it was going to take that time. So yeah, it did slow down stuff but what was great was that I worked very intensely on the Gavin Friday album in London and I went back to it just this year and started looking at it with different perspective and I was glad I didn’t finish it this time last year. I was glad I was away working with the U2 boys, but I always stick in my own stuff.

“I always will find time for my own stuff. I do what I want to do and I’m very lucky to be able to do that. That sounds arrogant, but I don’t like following the straight road. I like going up around the coast, up the hills, sometimes to the moon.”

Has he heard any of the Songs of Experience material?

“I’ve heard some stuff,” he admits. “U2 tend to work from A-Z and you’ll go, ‘Wow, there’s 26 fucking amazing things here, there’s three albums here!’ And then suddenly you won’t know what the fucking album is until they decide ‘these are the 12 songs we’re mixing.’ They’re really productive, and there’s so much stuff that they didn’t put on Songs of Innocence, so I would not like to be the anthologist that tries to put that together when they’re all gone like The Beatles. It would probably take 1000 years to put together. I have heard it and it’s exciting. It’s more aggressive than the last album.”

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