Can you clarify if there's any truth behind the story that Gardens.. was originally called She Stood Up And Cried? Or was that a completely different project?

That was just a title I had for something else. It wasn't going to be Gardens.. From Gardens.. was always going to have a name, you know, that was like this.

So what was going to be on She Stood Up And Cried then?

I think that was probably a song album that I thought of. I seem to remember that that was maybe something to do with Richard Jobson.

Because that would have been coming out around the Summer of 1982

Yeah, I mean I suspect it was perhaps an album title that I had, provisionally thinking at some point I've got to put together an album and call it that.

So why didn't Why-Fi want to release it?

From Gardens..? No, I'd left them by then.

So it took over a year for the album to finally be released. It must have been pretty frustrating?

Yes and probably during that year was when I left Why-Fi because... yes, it's hard to know the sequence of events. But I wouldn't have wanted to do it with them anyway.

You weren't too happy with Why-Fi were you?

No and I had a very, very bad deal with them. So I didn't want to do this at all. I mean I probably was still with them when I was recording it but I certainly wasn't doing it for them. And I had to get out of my deal and that obviously took negotiating. So I can't really say the exact date but obviously the process was in motion - even if technically I was still with them when I recorded the album - the process was in motion of leaving them.

When it came to recording the tracks, did you have a system for doing it? Was it a case of laying down the piano track first and then the sound effects on top or was it sound effects first?

No, it was sound effects first on all of them. Always sound effects first. I think that's the thing that's different because so often people put on things afterward which add an atmosphere or they add sound effects, but I think what I was doing was I was using that as a starting point with every single track which was for me a far better way of going about it.

So what about the influences for this album? Would you say there was an Erik Satie influence? Or even overall for the rest of your music. Is that the sort of thing you were listening to at the time?

No, not especially so. I mean I had to play Satie stuff - things I did with Richard Jobson, I played some Satie with him. But I wouldn't have said it was particularly an influence. I think I would have probably just wanted it to not really sound like anything else. That would have been my goal always, to make something that really didn't sound like anything else.

It seems to have a similar approach to what people like Brian Eno were doing

Yeah, I would say that he was more of an influence. Music For Airports and all those sort of things. I was far more...

Generating an atmosphere

Yeah that's right and to have something that's played at a quiet level that's not in-your-face and you're not listening to the lyrics. You've got something that's just there, quietly there and..

..for background...

Yeah and that's always what this album was meant to be - played quietly.

So what about the influence for some of the song titles? From Gardens Where We Feel Secure and Out On The Lawn I Lie In Bed are actually lines from the WH Auden poem A Summer Night. So were the rest of the titles on the album taken from other poems?

Well this is a hard question because I used to just keep notebooks where I would put in ideas and lines from poems that I liked so I wouldn't ever write down by them what they were from. So I would not know if something was a line I'd made up or if it was a poem or what, really.

So I think it's only Auden, like you said. It's Too Hot To Sleep I made up. When The Fields Were On Fire I made up because that's to do with a situation that happened. Out On The Lawn I Lie In Bed is Auden. So altogether I'm not too sure unfortunately, I'm afraid to say!

You were saying that When The Fields Were On Fire was actually influenced by a situation?

That was like when they used to burn the stubble? At the end of the summer? We were sitting around the table one day and my mother said that she'd had this dream the night before, "That we were sitting around having tea", she said "Just like this" and she said "Suddenly the fire engines went past and we went out, walked up to the rec - the recreation ground - and all the fields - there was a hill behind - were all on fire because they had been burning stubble and it had got out of control". And at that moment we heard a fire engine go by! ( laughs )

Spooky!

Yeah so that's what that title is and that whole sound is meant to be like a fire burning through the field.

There was also talk of recording a follow-up album with more of a Winter theme and we were wondering if tracks like Melt The Snow and A Winter's Tale were perhaps written for that

Melt The Snow yes, A Winter's Tale no. Melt The Snow was, definitely, and that whole instrumental track that I think sounds like skating music - one of the Melt The Snow tracks.

I also at one point thought too that it would be - as a contrast - it would be good to do something that was much more.. well perhaps just more to do with the city, more dark and more... not dark, but more industrial and more city-like as well. But I didn't ever do that either. Melt The Snow was as far as I got. But I think actually a Winter album would be really nice.

Yeah, I think it would make a great companion piece to Gardens. So whose decision was it to remaster and reissue Gardens...?

Geoff Travis wanted to do it, yeah. Because the Japanese did it and it was nice that it was available on CD when the Japanese put it out but I think it was really nice that Rough Trade decided to do it again and put it out.

Talking about the Japanese reissue, was it Columbia Nippon's idea to whack on the extra tracks?

Yes! ( laughs )

Obviously you weren't too keen on that!

No! ( laughs )

Hence no extra tracks on this one! Who actually did the remastering of this reissue of From Gardens..?

Well I wanted to have a classical person do it and Geoff said he'd got a classical person and he turned out not to be a classical person at all. So anyway, it doesn't matter, and his name is Simon, I can't remember his surname. I only met him at the studio. So he did it! ( laughs )

So where was the remastering actually done? Was it done at that London studio or somewhere else?

No it was just done at a remastering place out in Barons Court/Earls Court area. It's a place that used to be called Chop Em Out but it's not called that now. This person does a lot of remastering, he's very sort of popular person that obviously people use, but I was a bit disappointed that Geoff didn't really get someone who was used to doing classical stuff.