Salmon views E(a)rnest as his folk record. It’s also his most loaded. Consciously arty, an easy/difficult listen, purposely threadbare and open to misinterpretation. The Beasts of Bourbon’s best slow burn number ‘Cool Fire’ has been re-visited while the significant work includes the self explanatory ‘Song With No Words’ plus a couple of excursions into heavily Australian accented French – ‘Touche-Moi Rien’ and ‘L’Exumation D’Yves Montand’. Indeed, the idea of Serge Gainsbourg is all over the record.

A die-hard fan commented, "even if you’re expecting the unexpected, it won't be what you expect."

What happened to hating the acoustic guitar?
Look, I’m a complex guy. You’ve got to wrestle with your demons. You’ve got to look the enemy in the eye, meet that challenge and come out the other side. I really wanted to do something that was a challenge for me. Something different but with the understanding it wasn’t going to be a cappella – it wasn’t going to be spoken word.

And you’ve gone to the nth degree by using a nylon string guitar.
Well, you can’t do things by half measure. I hate the sound of an acoustic guitar with a pick up. It sounds vaguely like an acoustic guitar. It’s a facsimile of an acoustic guitar.

Why the brackets in E(a)rnest?
Well, there’s two spellings for earnest with two different meanings. There’s Ernest the name and earnest the adjective. I realised I wanted it to be both. I thought it was funny doing a folky sounding, Joni Mitchellesque record and calling it earnest. That’s my idea of funny.

You reformed the Scientists recently for some very successful shows – but this record is about as far away from that, sonically, as you could get.
E(a)rnest was very much informed by the Scientists because in the structure of the music the Scientists embraced a kind of minimalism. And E(a)rnest embraces a more earthy minimalism but it’s minimalism nonetheless. It’s very skeletal and stripped back. There’s nothing more than is absolutely necessary in the arrangements.

Why did you re-visit "Cool Fire" – a song you previously did with the Beasts of Bourbon – on this record?
I’ve been performing that in a solo version for years and while I think the Beasts of Bourbon version is a fine enough version Tex doesn’t sing it, it’s not really Tex’s song. He did good with it on ‘Black Milk’ but people associate it with me and it’s nowhere to be found on record so it needed to be re-dressed.

Do you feel that way about any other songs in the Beasts of Bourbon back catalogue?
Not particularly. Maybe but ‘Cool Fire’ was something I had always intended to sing. I tend to let sleeping dogs lie for most of it.

You’re not afraid to go French in your songs. ‘Come On Spring’ that you did with Antenna comes to mind. There’s two overtly French influenced songs on E(a)rnest.
It’s particularly brave when one doesn’t speak any French. It’s a coincidence really even though it does happen to coincide with the fact I like Serge Gainsbourg. Even though all the entendre in his work washes over me because I can’t understand a word of it. But apparently his stuff is very ambiguous and that’s part of the enjoyment of it. I get a lot of pleasure out of just listening to him.

People often associate using French as being very pretentious?
You have to be pretentious because when you create something it’s all artifice – it’s created from nothing. I think people are scared of the idea there’s too many connotations. ‘Touche-Moi Rien’ just had a French sound to it and because I was doing my folk record I thought this one’s obviously the Jacques Brel number. So I thought it should have a French verse as pretentious as that may sound and it is.

What about ‘L’Exhumation D’Yves Montand’?
I found what happened after his death to be rather macabre and dark. A woman claimed that he was her father and sued the Yves Montand estate for paternity. The French High Court declared that he should be exhumed and have D.N.A tests done on his body to determine whether she had a claim. I found the whole story outrageous in the extreme. Forget about what’s just and right and genetic technology – it was just an outrageous story and macabrely amusing. I found myself singing these silly rhymes the next few days after having read it and thought, ‘Gee I’ve got a song here’. It wrote itself basically.

People are going to take this as a very personal statement. Many of the songs are in first person and people are going to take this as a very personal statement. A stark diary.
It is only in that it’s all me ha ha ha. It’s all about me – you better put the irony in there. But the literal meaning of the songs is not – never has been with my songwriting. I quite often write in the first person as many songwriters do and they’re not talking about themselves.

How hard is it getting people interested in what you’re doing after 25 years and so many records?
I think it comes down to trying to re-invent yourself. To be honest I don’t particularly want to make the same record again and again – I’ve got to keep myself interested. Those people who have been successful doing the same thing I couldn’t do that. I think every record I’ve done has been markedly different to the one before and it’s been to the detriment of what people would call a career. With the Scientists I couldn’t have gone on doing that, I left the Beasts of Bourbon when I should have stayed with them – good sense would’ve said to do so. Good sense would’ve said keep Antenna together you’ve got a chance – don’t let it go. But really it wasn’t exactly what I had in my head. I’ve had a different idea or a different agenda all along.

Tell us about the living art shows you did recently at the Ian Potter Museum of Art? You came on every hour on the hour to play as an art piece?
There’s been art rock around before but I wanted to take it to its full extreme. How many people have gone ‘what I do is art and should be displayed in an art gallery?’ Nobody’s had the balls to do that. They’ve probably thought it was being pretentious.

Did any school groups come through?
There might have been one. But I wasn’t pointed at and the teacher didn’t say ‘this is a really good example of juxtaposition of symbolism. Note the use of vulgarity in his rakish guitar angle’. None of that occurred. It was very confronting though. Bloody hell I put myself through it there.

What happened with producing the Casanovas? A failed experiment?
I think they listened to their lawyer/record company guy who wanted to make them into something like Warped. He didn’t like the thing I did with them so much. Also people don’t want to be told what to do and I wanted to tell them what to do.

Why was that?
Because I could see some obvious mistakes. One was that Tom should’ve been singing ‘I’ll Keep it Hot for You’ even though Jim the bass player wrote it. It’s a great song, a fantastic song and Jim did a creditable version of singing it on the version we had. But I got the feeling that Tom should’ve sung it because his voice is identifiably Casanova-ry. It would’ve been the icing on the cake. It would’ve been the thing that made it a hit. Maybe it’ll be a hit anyway and good luck to them I hope it is. There’s a real lot of potential in that band and I hope they realise it.

They’ve mentioned you freaked them out by using a click track.
I wanted the rhythm section to sound really fat and hard and solid and the way to get that is to be in time. AC/DC is the classic example. It’s a pretty standard feature. But I don’t want to be critical of them because it’ll look like I’m being bitter and twisted but really I just saw some potential there.

What about if back in 1979 a producer had come in to the original Scientists recordings and said that someone else should’ve sung ‘Last Night’?
If it was for ‘Last Night’ I would’ve said ‘yes, certainly’. If it was for something off ‘Blood Red River’ I would’ve said ‘fuck off I didn’t ask you here in the first place.’