Howard was in the middle of a feverish dream.

It was a dream lined with creatures beyond the realms of simple imagination - snaggle toothed mice dripping venom from hideously decaying cavities - spiders picking up unidentified items of food and scuttling away into dusty corners as soon as they catch the mind's eye.

There was Napoleon pretending to be Nick Cave wading through a slough of slime.

He awoke at the tender stroking touch of an insect's silken legs on his eyelids to see a figure framed in the doorway. I walked into the room - stepping over an unfinished manuscript - Howard fell back to sleep and started talking.

A darkened room - with a light shining through the floorboards - Howard Devoto was talking to Don Watson.

I wished I was a fly on the wall.

He was terrifying to look at - arms knotted in front of him in an ungainly tangle - he pushed forward a pale face - wracked with demented amusement. His dilated - blood shot eyes burned through a glaze - indicating a measure of observation through the turmoil of sleep deprivation. A scatter of crushed petals fell from his hand.

In the hush of St Paul's Cathedral - two people were talking - their laughter echoing blasphemously around the walls of antiquity.

Whatever else might have happened - Howard Devoto still has his sense of occasion - in a pseudo-tourist rendezvous we meet - as two exiles - at his named place - on the steps of St Paul's.

As I approach from the side - Howard sits staring studiously into the distance - affecting a familiar pose of gnomic malevolence.

"Let us look inside this ancient emporium" he invites with a sparkle - indicating the cathedral with a sweep of parodic grandeur. With the collar of a green canvas shirt sticking out from a crumpled grey jacket - he looks like the archetypal gallery habitue - occupying an apparently eternal nook between youth and middle age.

It's a role that - for at least ten minutes - he's happy with.

"It's rather like an Aztec ruin" he pronounces in learned irreverence as we troop amongst the babbling tourists - the gold eat and the omnipresent icons.

"No one knows why they come here" he continues"no one knows why it exists - except of course for the perpetration of some enormous lie."

Not to be outdone - I venture that the lie is profoundly interesting.

"A lie is the most grotesque crime in the world" he pronounces"but then again - perhaps crime makes life more interesting."

"Who knows?" he asks with cliched resignation.

For all his protestations of awkwardness - I can't avoid the suspicion that this was all crass manipulation. As someone later commented my intro was being written for me. Tough luck really since I'd already invented four.

We both seemed to be grappling with the same thing though - me with the parodies that begin this piece and him with his parodic pretensions - that thing being just how viable it is.

How long can you continue to travel at the speed of night without meeting yourself coming back and dying of instant and terminal embarrassment? How long can you continue a facade of serious minded intellectualism without bursting into one huge enduring - alluring - mocking - shocking belly laugh? Or in his case how long can you be Howard Devoto without breaking into a mild-mannered but stubborn amusement?

The answer - I was to discover in a mixture of relief and frustration - is that despite the initial pretension the Howard Devoto of capital letters and intellectual fetters is no more.

The last epic masterpiece - 'The Correct Use Of Soap' - still one of the world's most frightening records - is sunk deep in the past - the Howard Devoto of long pauses and impenetrable gloom is gone - to be replaced by a Howard Devoto of a different mystique - long pauses and an impenetrable contentment - but of an equally undeniable importance.

All his colours turned to water - he paints now in lighter hues - outlining a more noble form than before with a greater affection.

In the rainy season of Britain '83 - the new Devoto single burns with high desires and glistens with an ionised elation. It's an inexplicable excitement in the midst of a despair - the illicit elation of Max Ernst's Europe After The Rain- strange beauty in the aftermath of destruction.

It Sounds to me like a new manifesto - to him it's simply a slightly incoherent love song"not simply mourning the end of a relationship".

And so were back with the hobby horse - these images of love that dominate the field of vision still - that form the basis of the most vile blandness - but still manage to fire some fervent imaginations even now.

As before - Howard is unsure whether to stroke or scorch the scarlet flowers of romance - but there's an indication now that Devoto is stretching from the slime towards the lofty and the beautiful.

"I'm simply no longer interested in going I - Me - Pain - Void - Horror. Musically - the new stuff is entirely different - there is certainly still a lot of myself in it - but I'm no longer using the heavy aesthetic of the Magazine period."

"I don't want to work with epic agony anymore - and I don't want to be megalomaniacal."

"I suppose it's still in me" he continues with a tendency - however sarcastic - to perpetuate the mystique"quietly inflaming a corner - but that 'Give Me Everything' syndrome - is hardly there any more."

"Lyrically - I find it hard to look beyond myself - so yes there is going to be some similarities because I am still the same flesh and blood - though not entirely - my inclinations are quite a lot different."

"My early image was the result of me stretching myself - saying things that perhaps I nearly believed - like all that stuff about being influenced by 'Against Nature'. Really - I was just playing with the possibilities of being granted a public persona."

"With this new material - the original idea was that I would write the songs and get a female vocalist in to perform and record them. So when I was writing them I had a greater sense of freedom than before - simply because I wasn't writing for this tulpa - or otherwise - called Howard Devoto"

So are we glimpsing Howard Devoto as simply himself?

"There's no such thing as being simply yourself - it's made endlessly complicated by the fact that you're not dealing with a number of people who are your friends and know you quite well. If you're as stumbling as ham you simply cant manage all these endless complexities."

'I am not a naturally spontaneous person - I m naturally awkward - so at first I thought I'd chuck in this and chuck in that. I even wish I could shill be bothered to do it - but very quickly builds up a goddamn tulpa that you have to live with and deny every day of your life.

"I have now sent back my membership of Aliens Anonymous. lam not an alien." he continues - beginning to sound like a scene from The Elephant Man. "I don't get strange looks when I buy the newspaper."

"God! We're psychologically grave digging again - I don't want to do this any more - I've talked about myself enough until I was blue in the face - and I think a lot of other people were blue in the lace as well. I have now stopped - and if that means I'm now doing the same as everybody else - then fine. That means lam a member of the human race and no alien."

Would you like lobe totally anonymous Howard?

"That would suit me quite well." So as the icon shatters before my eyes - something I'm not altogether unhappy about - you and hare left with 'Jerky Versions Of The Dream' - the vision that remains behind the fading image of The Great Man.

"The dream - of course is the romantic dream" he explains"it's a title I hope will convey awkwardness - variety - sex - cinema-"he tails off"-and stupidity. still."

Are you moving away from the beauty of cruelty?

"Yes I'm moving away from it" he smiles. "I can measure the miles- The themes of cruelty were always more sell-directed than anything else anyway."

Do you believe in romance now Howard?

"Not for the greater part-for a fairly substantial part. It's a matter of how much you're going to bet - what your odds on is for success and happiness."

So what's the alternative? "The lack of it - which a lot of people have to live with and do live with - even perhaps with a reasonable degree of happiness - perhaps through work - perhaps through believing inhumanity - or God - perhaps for the sake of their children."

Given that you don't have any children do you believe in work - humanity - or God then?

"I believe in work and I have to believe inhumanity. At least I believe that it exists and that it's better that it exists than that it doesn't exist."

Howard Devoto used to want to be a cowboy. he still cherishes a sneaky desire to be a little more like Alice Cooper and he's still not sure whether he wants to be Howard Devoto. He doesn't know whether to believe in the crystal edifice or stick his tongue out at it - but somewhere at home he has a cassette of a young girt telling him how sensual he is onstage.

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