Interesting questions! Made me really think. Thanks very much.

That's a leading question because it was produced by my engineer, Gary. I liked the production on Beauty Stab. If Beauty Stab wasn't as successful as Lexicon of Love, it was still a solidly respectable second album and there was nothing wrong with the production. If it didn't sell as many, that would be for a lot of reasons, not necessarily to do with the production. I think it would have sounded quite similar if I had done it.

I think Steve did a great job of that record. I think that if I'd have done it, I don't know if it would have been more orchestral. Do you know, I never think these thoughts, really. The Propaganda album, if you listen to Michael Jackson's Bad album, you hear a lot of the inspiration on that come from what Steve did on Secret Wish.

I still talk to him sometimes!

I liked The Incredibles.

I produced his album. At the time, no one was interested. I still think he's a brilliant singer and a really good writer. I don't think he's disappeared, I think he's still playing.

You're asking the wrong person!

I coined the term "beatbox", and yes I was aware because I met Afrika Bambaata in 1981, 1982 in New York and had a long conversation with him. He told me his favourite band at the time was the Guess Who, because they turned into Bachman Turner Overdrive. They had that big tune, American Woman. And when he told me that was his favourite band – it didn't strike me as the kind of band he would like. He said, "I don't like the songs but I have a live album and the drum breaks are great." So I thought, of course – when I heard the drum beat for Beatbox, I knew that Afrika would love it. So yes, I was aware.

Anne Dudley – Anne is an absolutely brilliant piano player. I used to say to her, "Play some piano", and that's probably exactly what she did.

Yes, I did think that AON were wildly groundbreaking at the time because I could see what people around me were trying to do with the same bits and pieces, only I had a great big box load of them because I'd been around the world with Malcolm McLaren, so I had samples from Nashville, Cuba, South Africa.

I remember the Rainbow, that was Finsbury Park, wasn't it? I remember that show. My mother-in-law, who's still alive, and is 96, came to that concert. She was obviously a lot younger then. She's a big Nat King Cole fan. So I said, being silly, "Here's a song for my mother-in-law, special request, we're going to play a Nat King Cole medley – Starship Trooper!" That period – I just did my best.

The record label! We'd done so well with 12-ins of Relax that I felt that the 12-in of Two Tribes was almost more important than the single. And I only actually delivered Two Tribes when I mixed the first 12-in because then I felt confident that we had something worthwhile to put out. I wasn't surprised that it went to No 1, but I wasn't expecting it to be there for nine weeks. Cash – it doesn't work like that. I probably owed the bank millions and the royalties don't come through for a few years. There was no big cash spend. People get this idea that you get loads of money – they don't know what it takes to get yourself there.

West coast!

Yes, he is. Lol's a brilliant painter. I have lots of his pictures in my house. He's a lovely guitar player. I've always liked working with Lol, ever since we met back in... god knows when. 1983? If you listen back to some of those 10cc records, they all worked on the production, but Lol had the idea for how they did I'm Not in Love, and in the late 70s that was my holy grail of record production.

I'm afraid you've got that wrong – it's "love, coupled with immense pride". It sounds so funny because it's Ronald Reagan saying it. What was the inspiration behind that? I think you might find a lot of that stuff that was on War was basically stuff that Paul Morley gave me. When I went in to do the 12-in I said I needed some spoken word stuff. I always used to get professional actors to say the lyrics. All that stuff on War, I discovered afterwards, was from Mein Kampf. Which shocked me a bit! But Paul was always doing that kind of thing. I said, "Man, I don't know if I agree with it, where's it from?!"

As time passes you kind of block out all the bad bits, if you're still going anyway. You forget the bad stuff and just think of the good stuff. I had some great times working with Seal. I think his first album still stands up, it's a really good album. I think the Frankie stuff has aged really well - nothing's ever sounded like it since, and that's down to Steve Lipton who mixed Frankie, I think in some ways the best mixing anyone ever did. Incidentally Steve just engineered most of the music on the new Lion King film.

Paul Morley should get the credit for that. It was his idea to have a whole philosophy for the label. He thought of the name as well. Why hasn't it been repeated? Well it probably has, but it hasn't broken its first three acts in the first year. People start labels all the time.

I didn't really learn much from Eddie that I hadn't already learned because I really loved the way Eddie made Yes sound. I think that if I learned anything from Yes, it was a totally different kind of pacing. Up to the time I worked with Yes, I was a pop star. I played pop music. I wasn't a rock guy or a blues guy or anything like that. Yes had a totally different idea of pacing. Their songs were much longer, everything was longer. I learned a lot from Chris Squire about harmony.

Well... Mute is really a one-off. It's the only record label like it. ZTT was very different because we signed three acts and in that first year we broke all three acts. Did all the development and broke them in a year. But we were in a difficult situation because we were going through Island which was going through EMI, so we couldn't offer artists a deal that a proper major could offer them. You try having the hottest act around when you're a tiny subsidiary of Island and see how long you last. Propaganda only made one record on ZTT, the second was Virgin, so we couldn't really be blamed for that. Frankie's second album was always going to be difficult, like it is for any group after your first album. Best thing is to just do it and get onto the third.

Yes, I use small speakers a lot of the time to spare my ears. Big speakers are still important if you have a lot of actual performances on a record, lots of people playing. Most records these days are made in the same way that, when you buy food in a packet and you add water to it – a lot of records are made like that. You're not actually recording anything. If you're recording, you need big speakers sometimes.

I wonder if people ask Bob Dylan who the next Bob Dylan is and what kind of answer they'd get. Music evolves and there's a lot of good producers around at the moment. Mark Ronson, he knows what he's doing.

It is commercially available! You just have to contact the right website. Why was it deleted – I redid it because the band asked me to. I think they had a difficult experience with Benoit.

I don't care who would win a competition like that! Producing isn't a showboating job, it's trying to get somebody's idea of what makes a good record right. It isn't trying to do the most impressive version of some song with somebody.

Current artist... mostly when I hear bands from England, I feel that. Even when American bands aren't that good, the records sound really good. Whereas over here people can get hung up on an old BBC mentality. But I don't listen to production on records. If someone wants me to work with them, the worst thing they can send me is a well-produced demo – what's there for me to do?

Malcolm was a very interesting person. Surprisingly kind and not particularly egotistical. Laughed at himself so hard sometimes we all laughed, you know. He took me to places I never dreamt one could go and dropped me in some of the funniest situations I've ever been in in my life – we flew down to Nashville and rented a studio in the middle of nowhere that normally specialised in gospel records. They had a pressing plant out the back. Malcolm had hired a choir called the Hilltoppers. There was eight of them, they turned up in a purple van, they looked a bit like something from Deliverance. I set them up and we put the mics up in the air, we were trying to record Buffalo Gals and they were awful, absolutely awful. Malcolm came to me and said, they're awful, get rid of them! So I had to pretend to record them, then I gave them $70. They were really happy. That wasn't something I would enjoy! Things like - we went to Harlem in 1982, you practically needed an armoured car. We went to see a Cuban guy - that was something else. He gave us some cigarettes to smoke and we barely made it out. Those were the kind of things. I became very fond of him.

Subsequent work - I did a whole load of crazy stuff after Malcolm because I'd been to NYC and seen what was going on, and realised we were ahead. I came back and Art of Noise did the first ever digital drum loop in the world. No one did it before us. So yes, it impacted because of the knowledge that I gained from going to all those places.

No! Video did not kill the radio star. Maybe he had him down for a couple of minutes but he came back up again swinging and he's still healthy.

I wouldn't necessarily agree, but thank you. My PA in Los Angeles had a part-time job doing the dressing rooms for the Coachella festival. Her name is Marianne. And she met Belle and Sebastian because they were playing at Coachella. When she told them that she worked for me, they were interested in what I was like. I think they had no idea what somebody like me was like. And she obviously gave me a good report because the next thing was, I went to meet them in Scotland and I heard all of the songs for DCW. I had heard Belle and Sebastian quite a lot because my eldest daughter was a big fan. I loved one of their songs, Stars of Track and Field. When I met them we all seemed to like each other so we did a dummy run on the album up in Glasgow, recording the whole album in a day, straight into the computer. I wanted to get a feeling for what it would be like. I really enjoyed making that record, and I do think it came out really well - people always associate me with big whizz-bangy things, but actually that was a completely different kind of job. More like old-style record production - they liked take #15 and I liked take #9. And they're lovely people.

No, I liked the LP format, I suppose because it's what I grew up with. The idea that you would hear a single and like the single so you might be interested in buying an album by that artist always seemed to make sense to me. The 12-in was a totally different thing because it had a different purpose to an album. It was meant to be danced to. Albums aren't necessarily meant to be danced to – they're generally meant to be listened to unless you're somebody who likes to listen to dance albums.

The LP resurgence – sometimes it seems to me that everything's having a resurgence. When they talk about resurgence, it's just a little bit – what percentage of records sold these days are vinyl? So everything's got a shot, really. I'm happy if it's having a resurgence.

The idea that the Jags had was very different to the idea that ABC and Frankie Goes to Hollywood had. They didn't actually like my version of Back of My Hand. It was the first time that I realised that there were no absolutes in taste.

Machine Messiah has never been one of my favourite tracks! But I enjoyed recording it and I think the band played brilliantly on it. How was it producing Jon? Was there any drama? Nothing that I could write about. Jon's got a great voice and he did a really good job on 90125.

I tend to listen to old records like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. But I really also like synthesiser music – I really like Tomita. And travelling back in time – Dean Martin. He could have done with a good producer.

My favourite lyricist is Joni Mitchell, and my favourite lyric is Edith and the Kingpin, from the album Hissing of Summer Lawns. I can't pick a line - it's all brilliant. "Women he has taken grow old too soon / He tilts their tired faces gently to the spoon."

I don't think I ever discussed production with him. I don't think Liam thinks about production in the way that I think about it - he's an artist who writes music and does it all himself. So no, we never did. What were my thoughts on Firestarter? I thought it was mad but really good. It reminded me of a punk Art of Noise. And Liam is a lovely fella.

I suppose it would be a South African tenor called Siphiwo Ntshebe - he was Nelson Mandela's tenor. I did half an album with him and then he died of meningitis. I don't think anybody wanted to release it after he died because there was no artist to promote it.