The child is the father of the man

Peter Blegvad, writer, cartoonist, but most often musician, likes a good story. His new "best of" album, Choices Under Pressure, is full of them. We're in Blegvad's West London home. Across the book-lined room, a drawing of a glass of milk is bobbing around on the computer screen. I pull up a seat and Peter folds his svelte body into a chair next to the flatbed scanner. We are sitting comfortably.

Peter Blegvad, writer, cartoonist, but most often musician, likes a good story. His new "best of" album, Choices Under Pressure, is full of them. We're in Blegvad's West London home. Across the book-lined room, a drawing of a glass of milk is bobbing around on the computer screen. I pull up a seat and Peter folds his svelte body into a chair next to the flatbed scanner. We are sitting comfortably.

"I like the portability that a story has," he begins. "It gets dark, you light a fire, gather round and tell a story. It transports you. It's the most economic mode of transport in existence." For Blegvad, words, images and music are mutually intrinsic. "I find my own efforts lacking when they're just there on the page. I'm more confident when I've married the language to music, in the case of songs, or drawings and cartoons." Which prompts me to ask about Leviathan, the very funny, if at times obscure, comic strip which Blegvad drew for the Independent on Sunday in the Nineties and which is now collated in colourful hardcovers.

Leviathan is Levi, an omniscient baby with a light-bulb head and a rag-doll rabbit. "He has no face, making him a kind of everyman," says Blegvad. The thoughtful infant struggles for meaning in a world where cats speak in puns and a nameless dread might be called "Bob". Small dramas unfold with the profound humour and narrative logic of a Flann O'Brien novel.

"Sometimes he almost dies. Terrible things happen, but next week he's OK again. It's like a dream." Levi's genesis was a formative encounter with a psychiatrist. "I had a mini nervous breakdown at university and rather hoped I was going mad and would soon have visions like my hero William Blake," Blegvad explains. "The shrink said: 'you're not going mad, you're just immature.' It was like having a glass of cold water splashed in my face. The truth was so shatteringly obvious. I did everything I could to compensate for my immaturity. But any attempt to repress a characteristic simply has the effect of causing it to swell deep down in the Mariana Trench of your unconscious." Blegvad's inner baby grew to leviathan proportions, and so Levi was born.

Peter's own childhood was spent in Westport, Connecticut. In the mid-Sixties the family emigrated to London. Blegvad senior is Danish and Peter's parents met in Paris after the war. "They're Europhiles. Anyway, London was swinging. I grew my hair and joined rock bands." In the early Seventies he moved to Hamburg, where he formed Slapp Happy with the singer Dagmar Krause and the pianist Anthony Moore. Experimental and naive, Slapp Happy was a joyful counterweight to the pomp and glam of the day. "It was three very different people. That's what made it such a curious band," he says. "Anthony was influenced by folk musicians like Bert Jansch, but also Broadway and John Cage, and Dagmar was into Kurt Weill and German cabaret." Blegvad's crucial ingredients were soul, R&B, but especially the blues. "The blues has a dirty edge to it and it's just the perfect vehicle for lyrics. They can be the maddest ballads or the most surreal poetry."

The earliest recordings were made at Wumme studios under the guidance of cult Krautrockers Faust, progenitors of the tape loop and plant-hire approach to rock. "I became friendly with those guys so when they needed to fill their numbers for a tour of England they recruited me. I played guitar and various devices. A hydraulic jackhammer was one," he recalls, misty-eyed. After a couple of years, Blegvad escaped to New York, where he hung out at CBGBs and grooved to bands like Talking Heads. "That was a nice scene. Punk was a great permission-giver."

The stripped down simplicity of Slapp Happy had not, after all, been so far removed from the New Wave ethos. "In a way we did anticipate the sort of freedom punk insisted on," agrees Blegvad. "But we did it with charm, that was the difference. Sinister and charm always worked."

The sinister charm is still evident. Choices Under Pressure opens with the morbid "Waste of Time", but gains levity with tracks like "Gigantic Eye" (co-written with XTC's Andy Partridge) and "Daughter" ("That's my daughter, in the water/Everything she owns I bought her"). All but two of the acoustic reworkings have been previously recorded, mostly on Blegvad's half-dozen solo albums released since 1983. But no matter: they'll be unfamiliar to all but the die-hard fan. Which is a shame, because Peter Blegvad is a great songwriter who deserves a wider audience. One beautiful song is the country-tinged "Gold", a tale of love over gold prospecting.

Together we warm our hands over the crackling fires of other modern troubadours: Randy Newman, Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, and REM's Michael Stipe, Blagvad's fellow traveller in Eighties art-rock supergroup the Golden Palominos. "Like Beefheart, Stipe could always snatch it back from the brink of complete meaninglessness," Peter says. "In those days he was quite a poet. Probably still is." He laughs, though, when I mention Eminem. "It's interesting that Eminem has brought lyrics so much to the fore. My kids rather nervously played me 'Stan'. When I laughed they were a little nonplussed. They weren't sure if it was funny. What's funny about someone driving over a cliff?" But Blegvad recognises Eminem's antecedence. "Hey, I grew up with 'Leader of the Pack'," he says, giving me a quick burst of "Look out! Look out! Look out!" "It's the same deal. The guy can tell a story."

Blegvad's next project is another book. "It'll be a monument to milk," he says proudly. Ah-ha; I glance across at the floating screensaver. "I'm interested in the vertical exploration of one single narrow thing, rather than a horizontal inventory of many things. I want to go down so deep it actually turns into everything." Right. And why milk? It began with a scene in the film Suspicion, in which Hitchcock immersed a light into Cary Grant's milky glass for added brightness. "I saw it 25 years ago and it seemed to have a message for me to decipher. Why was that glass aglow? It wasn't only because Hitch put the light in. It's not just luminous - it's numinous!" Numinosity, he explains, is the charge of sacred power with which some objects can be invested. "Aldous Huxley famously saw the absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers. "

I think I understand, and with that I drain my coffee and leave Peter Blegvad to his Dairy Crest deliberations. He presses a card into my hand promoting his website www.amateur.org.uk and I slip out into dark, cold rain and the remains of late-winter snow. Turning the corner I notice a buttery luminescence hanging over Shepherd's Bush Green. Cautiously, I check the folds of my trousers.

'Choices Under Pressure' is released on Monday on Resurgence. 'The Book of Leviathan' is published by Sort of Books, £12.99