David Cunningham: "Well, I honestly don't know where to start. A good question but I've no idea how to answer it."

This is his first UK interview for three years. He needs dusting off, obviously. He's done "lots of foreign ones where they always talk about art" and not read the music press for a year – so I don't know what I'm supposed to say."

Good.

"It's all off the top of my head."

Better!

"I feel it's necessary to do these records but not from any great desire to change the world. I do other stuff, film music, it's important to be able to switch between roles and sometimes do something very lively and outgoing. The stuff I'm doing just at the moment is so laid back you'd hardly notice it (this may become a solo LP). It makes Eno's Ambient records sound like Top Forty.

"There's a great contrast between what I do and what I also do and how do you join the two? There's no way in terms of the marketplace to join these two really. But there are a lot of techniques which feed off one another. Like when I work with Michael Nyman (The Draughtsman's Contract soundtrack among others), there are a lot of Flying Lizard techniques employed in the recording which is unfortunate because that's why everyone says Michael's using synthesisers when in fact the instruments were just being mutilated."

From the 'Tears' of the late 20s to 'Purple Haze' of the late 60s, 'Top Ten' fiddles about with various cultural milestones.

"It's just the Flying Lizards top ten favourite tunes. Not my personal favourites. This is terribly pretentious but I've always toyed with the idea that the Flying Lizards represented rock and roll from some sort of alternative universe. It amuses me to think of a possible universe where James Joyce is a really popular author."

He later likens the title to being topped as in "people running around with no head, like chickens." A nice thought.

"In a sense there is this idea with the Flying Lizards of playing with history. The idea that there was a Flying Lizards ethic which dictated that the songs came from various sources. Larry Williams, who wrote ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie’ was shot as a pimp in a Los Angeles street. Which is the sort of thing rock and roll ends up doing to people.

"‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie’ becomes imbued with a certain significance if you know that. Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ was in that Herzog film, the one about the desert without any narrative in. I put on a showing of that at the Screen On The Green when This Heat played there. We showed the film before they played. When ‘Suzanne’ came on in this mysterious film about the desert, all these groovy people waiting for This Heat went ‘urg!’ like it was anathema to them. Strangely enough, I’ve always quite liked it in that context."

Are there particular aspects in other people’s songs that you seek to explore?

"I think it’s got a lot to do with aspects of style. It’s a stylistic thing as much as anything when dealing with somebody else’s song. Like ‘Purple Haze’ say, it’s dealing with something so established it’s already part of cultural history and you’re playing with that history, altering in slightly, re-writing it in a sense."

Later David ponders over his theory that Roxy Music were the first group to take ‘pop’ styles goneby and mould them into something new.

I wonder about Mrs Mills (something I’m often alone in doing). I spy a kinship between her reading of ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ and much of ‘Top Ten’.

"A true musical hybrid, Mrs Mills, she’s more like Michael Nyman than the Flying Lizards. She's got this very stylistic approach. Mrs Mills could play Mozart and it would sound more like Mrs Mills than Mozart. The same with Nyman and I suppose the same with the Flying Lizards although freer. There is this hybrid approach of taking from history.

"Taking what is basically a record of 1958 or whenever and the only thing my version has in common with the 1958 version is that there is a piano on it, none of the other instruments are the same in terms of physical structure – there’s a lot of electronically-generated sounds.

"The fuzzbox only came in the 60s so like, er (temporarily forgets title) 'Great Balls Of Fire’ it’s got an element from the 50s and from the 60s even a bit of operatic stuff and the ubiquitous drum machine which you get on everybody's records there days, which is the 80s bit I suppose.

"I've got this idea about recording techniques, this goes back to my alternative universe idea but suppose sing Elvis, when he started, instead of having a guitar had a Fairlight. It's a bit far-fetched but an interesting idea to conjure with. It’s like that Edward de Bono word association thing. Take two words and stick them together. Elvis Presley: Fairlight CMI. There's a whole vocabulary of ideas there. I think that’s possible the way I work.

I think ‘Sex Machine’ is more machine than sex.

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha."

What would James Brown think?

"I imagine he would hate it. I never quite know what to make of people who wrote these things and them mutilated by the likes of me. I remember when Berry Gordy was asked about ‘Money’ because he wrote and he came out with some terribly blasé remark about ‘anything that brings in a bit of money is great’, ‘a good song lasts forever’. All these fatuous statements. A lot of the writers of the things on Top Ten are dead though, aren’t they."

They might be turning in their caskets.

"I used to get letters like that when I did ‘Summertime Blues’ from people in Germany. In German they would say, ‘Eddie Cochran would spin in his grave’ – it sounds good I German. The people who wrote the songs I don’t think really care very much after a certain point, it’s the fans that care. After ‘Summertime Blues’ I would really have hated to spend any time in a pub full of Teddy Boys because I would have come to grief, basically. They wouldn’t have liked it, sacrilege is the word."

People do get very precious about their lifestyle icons. Like hippies. Like punks!

"I don’t mind as long as they don’t do it around my house."

Flying Lizard photos. A singer in the distance and DC lurking in the background shiftily dodging out of focus. An image?

"One lets it work itself out. There's a kind of punk element to the Flying Lizards in terms if my possible misunderstanding of the original ideas about punk. This was that you could simply do what you felt like doing. Not in the case of expressing yourself necessarily but if you felt like going into the studio and making a loud noise, you could go into the studio and make a loud noise.

"Then you could bring some aspects of discipline to that later perhaps and order it into a record. That's how I tend to work. Have a particularly nasty sound to start with then one slowly rationalises that into just bursts of a nasty sound and cleaned up with something nice to make a tune out of it.

"I've always been convinced the Flying Lizards were punk in terms of outlook. Punk to me was going down the Roxy and getting up onto that stage and being able to do whatever you liked – not that I ever did, I don't like doing gigs – but it was like that for a while and then it got slowly sorted out and popularised and made what it is by its audience more than anything else.

"So eventually everyone ended up sounding like Sham 69 and it was killed then. My idea of a punk band around '77 was This Heat. With the distorted guitars relentless rhythms I thought they embodied everything that were the qualities of punk rock.

“AIso, I could never differentiate between punk and some of the more interesting disco stuff. 1977 was the year of Anarchy In the UK and 'I Feel Love’. The Donna Summer record probably had a greater effect on me because I was in a bakery in Malta when I first heard and thought 'my God what's happening in Britain, I must get back and find out'. It took me by storm, that record."

Education. Schooldays and the Young Lizard.

"I’m a firm believer in continuous education. What you learn at school is 99% useless. You grasp language through books and talking not through grammar lessons and all that adding up stuff (maths), you use a calculator for that.

"I suppose the most valuable thing I learned at school was how to break the rules and get away with it. It was a very strict school, people would get expelled for long hair! It was fairly easy to break the rules because there were so many of them. At one point I sat and rationalised my sins, the grossness of them not the quality because there were extremely trivial offences. The main thing was not getting caught.

"I think it was very useful. Not so much breaking the rules as bending them, that's the crucial thing. With pop music you've got a given vocabulary and if you deviate too much from that you've broken some of the rules. If you go too far out of tune on a record people say 'ah, it's out of tune' and somehow they go off it. If you rationalise that out of tune element with something else then it works.

"Being a purist is quite a good thing. If you've got something that's out of tune don't bury it but push it right up so that everything else sounds out of tune. It sounds all right then."

David Cunningham bought his shoes in a junk shop in America.

This interview took place beneath an autographed photograph of the Australian cricket team of 1948.

David Cunningham would like to produce Bucks Fizz.