I don’t mind that I’m dirty. I’m too happy. You see, getting up here, alone, in this air, being away from the pressure to represent myself, I’ve had time to think about what I really want to do next, which you don’t when you’re on the road, or when you’re on the digital road, doing all the representing, and that’s when you go down paths that don’t suit you and get you trapped. I feel in a way that my career has only just started. I’m thirty-four. Reka didn’t make her best music until she was almost a decade older than that. We’re on the cusp of a new century. The world hasn’t ended yet. I think about me ten years ago, and I did what I did, and people liked it, but… the voice. It was sort of an amalgam of other voices, which everyone has to be at the start. All those great psychedelic bands: they started out by doing fairly straightforward cover versions, didn’t they. But you need your own voice, and I think that’s part of what makes something last, makes it something that is more than a song that people really like for six months then forget about forever, and you can’t force that voice. Some people are lucky enough to have it very quickly. I reckon McKendree might not have had it in 1966, but he definitely had it by 1968. It’s not been so quick for me, and I do think some of those early songs, they were kind of… Reka lite. But I think it’s here now, and it wasn’t about any trick or knack, it just came about by playing and, well, living on the planet for a number of years. There’s this feeling that all I was doing before was just sort of revving my engine, and now I’m ready to go. It’s exciting. There’s so much to be done. There’s Reka’s book, and the River Goddess album and that’s just the beginning.

So you’ve definitely ditched the whole Cave concept then?

Yes. That’s gone. It’s all about River Goddess right now, all the way. But it will take as long as it takes. I’ve done the whole thing of rush writing a record in between touring and interviews, not properly living with your subjects. I did that with Rust. I want this to be different. I want to enjoy the research as much as I enjoy the writing; I want to get right into the depths of it. You might call it procrastination; I call it prep.

Hence today’s little research trip.