Stephen described the process to Ryan as singing a song in your head while you worked. You worked the clay, sang the song in your head and somehow that made it magical.

‘Month after month I was down there, drinking tea, fondling the clay and singing in my head,’ said Ryan. ‘But being an artist is like being a shark – you’ve got to keep moving or you drown. So I asked Stephen to make the faces, the ones you saw at the Tate, to my specification, and that’s what he did.’

‘How did you get the emotional content?’ I asked. ‘And what did Stephen get in return?’

‘I just told him to think about how each face made him feel. Imagine my surprise when they popped out of the kiln emoting like actors.’ Ryan shook his head. ‘Stephen got paid.’

I asked him whether that wasn’t cheating, but he just sighed in an exaggerated way and told me not to be so bourgeois. ‘I didn’t make the mannequins either, or any of the other found objects I used. Art’s about producing something more than the sum of the parts.’ He waved his hand dismissively and I thought, You’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

‘And James Gallagher arrived around this time?’ I asked.

‘Like a bad smell,’ said Ryan. ‘Don’t you hate Americans? Not that James was a bad guy. I never thought he was a bad guy. But he arrives with his money and his family and I’ll be honest – he was a fair painter if your tastes run to the old-fashioned. Send him back to la belle époque and he’d have been knee-deep in Parisian pussy within a week.’

And he had to be branching out into ceramics, he had to be strolling into Ryan’s own hitherto secret world. But Ryan could have lived with all of that if James bloody Gallagher hadn’t been better at singing in his head as well.

‘Not that he just sat down and did it first time, you understand,’ said Ryan. ‘It was me that got him settled, showed him the ropes, pointed out where the loo was.’

‘How long it did it take him to learn?’

‘About three weeks,’ said Ryan. ‘I felt him do it, but you know what? As he sang the song, I did too. In my head. Suddenly it was so simple. And we sang together, sort of both of us with the clay running between our fingers, and for that moment I was in tune with the fabric of the universe. I was singing along with the actual music of the spheres.’

But the proof of the pudding is in the baking. So the next day both of them had rushed back down the sewers for the grand ceremonial opening of the kiln.