“When I first listened back to the songs I had recorded in The Growlery during the Australian summer of 2010–11, I thought How Things Are could be a double album. What happened, and what happened next. However, the second part wasn’t finished. Maybe it had only just begun. I had to get out there again.

Imaginary Lovers is what happened next. In my heart, or mostly in my head. Looking out of half-open hotel windows and talking in the dark. Walking with a red guitar case, hemispherically-challenged. I was pulled close and pushed away at home and abroad, and came out of the whole turbulent exciting mess with twelve songs I knew I had to finish and record. I was writing on my six-string again. Its simplicity is a familiar shorthand, the fastest way of putting down on tape what’s happening in my head. I liked knowing that the fewer choices I had to make, the better these songs would sound. For the band songs, Sebastian and I resumed our routine. Thumbs up through the glass. I’d prepare a song and he’d arrive with ideas and drumsticks. Domini added strings and I mixed the album with Simon, close to the sea in Black Rock.”

“I toured Garageband in Italy, the UK and America. From folk clubs to a BBC TV studio in Belfast. I hadn’t forgotten a series of songs I’d written in Vancouver. Decided to finish them, and record others I’d co-written over the past few years with a series of friends. I’d go back to Vancouver and record them live in the same studio. I didn’t start off planning it this way but, looking back, it was the opposite approach to Garageband, which was written in fourteen days and took a year to record in studios all over the world.

“Early in 2005 I bought a white laptop which came with recording software. I started playing around with it.  I’d re-read On The Road, and started recording using Kerouac’s automatic writing method. I knew he’d edit meticulously afterwards, but I’d think about that later. The first song on Monday turned into a second on Tuesday and a third on Wednesday. I set myself a target of ten songs in ten days and ended up with fourteen, recording vocals and acoustics with the laptop’s microphone, using samples and loops for everything else.

Later that year, touring the UK with Rad, I called Real World and booked two days to record. John Leckie lived nearby and was free. He said he’d come and produce. We gathered in the studio and John set up Rad with a grand piano in the Stone Room.  We finished recording the tracks I’d planned in super-quick time. “What’s next?” John asked. I played the recordings I’d made on my laptop, and asked him what he thought I should do with them. My vocals recorded on a laptop microphone were playing through Real World’s state-of- the-art monitor speakers. “Radiohead would have spent a month getting that sound. Let’s do those ones, have you got a drummer?”

“A new home in the sun, incense, the so-called ‘war on terrorism’. Looking for a direction to write a new album, you usually find it’s there already. You just have to be able to detect it and make the right choices. Many of these are the result of coincidence and luck.

After the Coz I’m Free writing session, a producer recorded a version of In A Groovy Kind Of Way which was used in a Kirsten Dunst film. He asked me to come over to London to write more. The session was cancelled and I was alone in W12 with a coffee maker and my Epiphone, writing and listening to Radio 4. 9/11 was still on everyone’s minds (will it ever not be?) when news of the Bali bombing came through. I had grown up in a real life war on terrorism, moved to Australia, and now suddenly it was a worldwide concern. I visited my sisters in Dublin and then flew back to Australia with a one-day recording session on tape and a yellow legal pad full of words.

“I moved to Switzerland and wrote most of these songs in an ancient wooden house in a small town, looking out over the Rhine Valley at the mountains in the distance. I’d cycle to the post office with Sebastian, getting used to living in a land with a different language. I took trains to tour. Flew from Zürich airport to festivals all over the world.

“After Destination Beautiful, I recorded Altitude with Tim and Liam in Melbourne and we toured the world as ALT. I dived head first into co-writing, and discovered a music scene in Dublin where I fitted in. It was time to record outside Northern Ireland for the first time. I was a solo artist again — independent, broke, happy.

“Recording was booked for June 1993, and there was a baby on the way. Should we cancel? No, maybe it’s the best time to record. Christine and I stayed in my parents’ house and I’d drive the twenty miles to Randalstown every morning, not knowing when I’d get the call. When producer Rod McVey and I met at the studio, I had one eye on the clock.

We threw everything at this recording. In our finest moments at Homestead it was all about us having the best time doing what we loved. Rod, Mudd Wallace, Enda Walsh and I were free to throw all our ideas at the tape machine and see if they worked. We were aware of what the outside world was listening to, but largely ignored commercial demands. This independent path was difficult at the time, but listening back I can hear its worth. Whatever you may think, this is authentically the sound of what went on in the studio.

At one of our partings, in Paris, I had written “destination beautiful” on a baggage tag of Christine’s. That was always going to be the album title. It’s baby blue and dedicated to Sebastian.”

“I played all over Europe from Scandinavia to Spain. When the Berlin Wall came down I was invited to play a week-long festival in East Berlin with my band. After the Velvet Revolution a bus arrived to drive us from Glastonbury Festival to Prague. It was a time of historical change and we were playing in the heart of it.

I went back to North America and discovered the how long the road could be. Back in Europe, I went looking for James Joyce’s grave in Zürich, then got to know my future wife in Paris. I was writing wherever I went, spending more time in Dublin, where Peter Price signed me to Warners. I went back into the studio with Rod, words spilling out of my little black book.

“In the North they played the national anthem in the cinema after the credits rolled. Playing shows on the border they wanted The Soldier’s Song. On the street outside, The Sash, and in folk clubs, rebel songs. We listened to John Lennon and Teenage Kicks, The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan. An MCA Records executive told me at Rave On’s New York launch how it sounded like it was recorded in Los Angeles. I smiled and nodded, staggering under the impact of the jazz cigarette he’d just handed me. Thought of the rain on the telephone wire and the sound of the marching band disappearing down Main Street.

Halfway round the world I press play and see cigarette smoke curling up through the light of the piano lamp. Northern Irish countryside outside the door, dark and damp. Those marching bands and the daily quota of violence on TV whenever we’d take breaks from recording and drinking whiskey to eat Sugar Puffs in the kitchen, laughing. It was 1986 and we’d survived all that Wham! could throw at us. Tangled up in a studio twenty miles outside of Belfast playing our hearts out and reaching deep into something we knew was good.”