Do you get many people coming up and talking to you?

Oh, a lot of people, awful lot of people. I tell them it's art, I tell them... I just explain myself really.
The good thing about Cambridge is I don't get beaten up doing it. Cambridge is that wonderful place where they accept eccentrics, well if you think I am eccentric. I don't think I particularly am.

Apparently there's this guy someone saw who was taking his dog for a walk except that his dog was a toy dog on a lead. There are certain advantages to that, you don't have to feed the dog, it doesn't crap anywhere, quite interesting. Everyone's a bit potty in Cambridge I think, and artists are particularly potty anyway. Most artists are a bit eccentric in some way because they have to be, to have these original thoughts. I think to lead an original life you have to have original thoughts, to have original thoughts you have to have an original life in other words.

I would personally agree with that, but I think some 'career' artists would take issue with that, they see themselves as leading normal lives.

Well, it's a job to them. One might argue they're not really breaking new ground, they're copying other people's work. If I put myself in a situation whereby I experience a unique emotion through wearing a salmon on my head and from the responses you get, then you can put that in your writing or your art. It's quite practical. You experience things the average person doesn't experience, and therefore you can have original thoughts.

About four years ago I went completely potty, completely manic. I was completely barmy but I had a lot of original thoughts, for example an idea of an outdoor piano. Basically a piano designed to go outdoors, can be played outdoors and is vandal proof and weather proof. You might go to the Yorkshire Dales, go up on a hill and you find this nice piano. It's quite an interesting idea, it can be done.

Like point painting I thought of four years ago when I was high. You know when you're high and you're mad you make connections that other people don't make and madness can be original thought because these thoughts can lead to creativity.

There's a book by Ambrose Bierce called 'The Devil's Dictionary' where madness is defined as: "a high degree of intellectual independence."

It's a matter of scale. I hate to mention the obvious artists, but Van Gogh, who cut off his ear, would have had to be pretty bonkers to cut off his ear wouldn't he? I know a woman in Fulbourn [psychiatric hospital] who blinded herself. Very very sad - you have to feel very disturbed emotions to feel do that but that can be creative as well. Mental illness is about having unique emotions or emotions that are very extreme. It can be joy and it can be pain. Obviously, it's pain with her and it's been joy with me. I've had a rush of emotion, I remember many times I've felt absolutely wonderful. I've felt lousy as well because that's the manic depression. And in these very high moments it's like a symphony, it's like one of Mozart's operas when you reach a crescendo, it's better than an orgasm. It's wonderful, and you start having very high creative thoughts then.

I think that quite a lot of artists would probably recognise what you're talking about, whether they think of themselves as manic depressives or not. I think that often creative thought leads people into states of heightened activity in which their senses are wide open to all sorts of input that most people block.

It's temporary enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense of enlightenment.

So your activity is on some level a personal spiritual endeavour?

Mmm.?

You've found an identity, 'Mr. Barmy Art', which is something you've constructed for yourself and made into a public identity. Do you still have your personal identity?

Yes, sure.

Do they cross over?

I have my personal life whereby I originally had a girlfriend - I don't anymore, we... agreed to part. I do have a very strong relationship with God, you know. I do pray, I do have a spirituality that I draw upon.

That has become your personal life?

God is very much my best friend, yes; my personal best friend. I went through evangelical Christianity for a while; I didn't find that very satisfactory. It was very secure and comfy and fundamentalist for a while and then I went to Anglo-Catholicism then Buddhism. I have a very strong sense of God and being called by God to something, being led along a path. Daily I ask God to use me and my life. I just want to be used. If I can do a little, putting it in religious terms, do a little work for the devil and much work for God, I'd be happy.

It sounds like that sense of spirituality doesn't fit very comfortably within the structures of a church.

No, because you can't confine god in human structures.

It occurrs to me that one reason why you have such a close relationship with God is that in lots of ways you're a very expansive personality, a big personality, and people tend to also need something that's bigger than themselves like parents and social structures. Is that how your relationship with God works?

Very much so, because, I was chatting to my psychotherapist recently - I see a therapist - I was saying that I love the religious delusion or vision, if you like. I tend to think I can influence things I can't influence but it's good to have something bigger than yourself that you can always fall back on. If you are God, and many people feel they have been in history, then when rough times come they just fall because there isn't anything bigger. It's good to have something that's bigger and stronger than me that I can call upon.