Your Paris shows in the 1960s were pretty wild, what did you do?

I used to do a lot of stage-diving and pull people out of the audience who were passed around and undressed as they were passed around, not in a sexual way, just as the natural end point of the event. We were playing seven nights a week and Saturday afternoons and decided we couldn't do the same show every time, so we'd make up songs, pieces of music, bits of theatre, slapstick. That's what began the full theatrics.

Some of your music was pretty ground-breaking, too, wasn't it?

In 1973, we were the first band to use a drum machine. It wasn't a replacement for a drummer, more a new direction. I felt at the time that it was the way a lot of rock would go because of the fact that people had readily accepted all the other electronic instruments. Some of the drums were generated electronically, others were on tape loops, so it predated that whole hip hop approach.

What kind of reaction did you get at your shows?

I remember in one gig a guy came and smacked me in the teeth. Gig managers would kick our gear down the stairs. At the time I was performing naked [1960s], I was called for a meeting with the leaders of the Communist party - they lost a seat in parliament because of my performance. We had the police coming down to the dressing room trying to get us to sign statements. In Sicily, I was put in a maximum security prison for doing all sorts of things - it was a riot. And then, of course, the normal pop groups of that time didn't like us. We ran into a lot of trouble - my band set fire to a Mafia club because they hadn't been paid.

Did you ever get injured?

While performing, my clothes caught fire - clubs caught fire - but the damage came from other things. One time, as I hit the high scream [in 'Fire'] one of the huge stacks of Marshalls fell, landed on my foot and broke it. At one concert, they put the strobe on the wrong speed and the bass player accidentally smacked me in the face and laid me out. I had 14 stitches in my left hand when the keyboard player got a bit overexcited and leapt on me. We rolled around on the stage and someone had left a glass there which cut me.

Do you ever get a feeling that you're lucky to be alive?

Yes. All the Crazy World are gone. I was very lucky. In the late 1970s, I got into the spiritual stuff and then went to Texas. I got married and needed to find a place where my son could be brought up and found Austin, Texas. I worked as a carpenter and had a house-decorating business with Jimmy Carl Black, the drummer from the Mothers of Invention [and the Indian of the group]. We were doing music as well.

Texas seems like a strange choice of state for someone like you to live in?

Austin is the San Francisco of Texas: it's very liberal. According to Americans, it's the live music capital of the world. It's a wonderfully cultured place with everything from experimental theatre to music from all over the world. The woman who won a recent temple-dancing competition in Bombay came from Austin, Texas.

You took a Master's degree in counselling. Tell me about the counselling work you did then.

I would do it with the guitar. My friend would do the talking and I would listen and get all these underlying feelings coming out and it'd just come out in the song, like a trance. We'd give them a tape of the song, which could be anything up to eight minutes.
But someone got all these official bodies on my back - which is when I found out that they won't mess with someone who's in the church 'cos it counts as pastoral counselling and the State is not allowed to interfere with the church. I found that I can become a reverend in a week so I did and it allowed me to continue my work.

Have you ever married anyone as an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church?

Yes. Guitar teacher Mike Harris in Austin, Texas - it was lovely. I wore a white polo neck and a purple suit.

You always seem to do everything five years too soon: do you ever feel you should keep things on a back burner for a while?

No, I like new ideas. And performing has always been a like a bit of alchemy. What I deal with in my songs is what comes into my life. I'll probably explore singing on the next album.

Do you have any plans for your unreleased work?

I don't know where the first album is [recorded for Polydor] or whether it still exists at all. Let's ignore the version of 'Fire' I did with The Stranglers - I don't think any of us want to see that released. There's stuff from Texas [recorded with Jimmy Carl Black], about 20 hours worth: we'll probably condense it.