How did you get interested in electronic drums in the first place?

"Well, around '77 or '78 I borrowed a Synare III from a shop in Glasgow, played around with that for a while and quickly got fed up. I couldn't find anything with it that hadn't already been done, and as a consequence got very frustrated and decided to leave it alone.

It had the Anita Ward 'Ring My Bell' sound, and a couple of others. It had a very low sound which I liked to double with the snare, but that involved hitting them both at once. So then I started to use a mike on the snare to trigger the Synare. The problem with that was spill from the other drums triggering it too early. I could have solved the problem, but that would have meant getting into gates, which wasn't a very practical solution. After that I didn't get involved too much until Simmons came along, I did a few sessions using the Simmons – Annabel Lamb, John Ottway – and found it very interesting except that it was in a way, such a cliched sound, especially the toms. But the bass drum sound I liked. I've tried the Clone and another thing with triangular pads but I didn't go much for that, I found the shape very disconcerting.

"The first drum computer I ever used was the Roland 606, then the TR808. On that I liked the snare and the hand claps but didn't really like many other aspects. I've tried the Drumulator, but with that there's no tone change or pitch change so you're stuck with the presets. The Linn has been the most effective of any of the drum computers that I've used so far, but it's gone further than that already. For instance, it's possible to record one drum beat, lock it into an AMS (digital delay) and store it in there. By pressing various buttons you can play back that beat and widen it, close it up, or whatever. And you can build up whole tracks with this thing – but it's a long process to tap it all out. You can't set up patterns or play patterns continuously; you have to tap out every beat. And you can record sounds from tape. I've heard that someone – I don't know who – has lifted the snare sound from Bowie's 'Let's Dance' track, and put it out on a record."

How does the Linndrum work?

"Inside the Linn are micro-chips, and each one has a different preset sound encoded into it by the manufacturer – bass drum, tom, whatever. To program it is quite a simple operation; the front panel is self-explanatory. You can select four, eight, 16 or 32 beats per bar and place your pattern around that. By pressing the appropriate button – bass drum, snare and so on – you allocate the beats that you want with the sound that you want. You can then go on to form chains, which work in bars. So you can set a pattern for one bar and then, selecting the bars, get it to repeat for the number of bars that you want. No pads, it's just pushing buttons – simple.

"The drum sounds already in the Linn machine when you get it are really very good. I believe some of the sounds on it were done by Steve Gadd; I've a feeling they might have got some of Jerry Marotta's stuff in there as well. Apart from that, I don't know. Understandably, Linn are very cagey about who it is that has done what.

"I had a complete set of my own drum sounds put on to Linn chips for me by Roger Linn prior to the recording of our first album. I went into Air studios for a day with our producer, Vic Coppersmith, recorded each of my drums individually and had those sounds encoded on to the chips. The recording process is very straightforward except that because the chip won't accept any ambience on the recorded sound you have to gate it very heavily. As the maximum sample time is something like one second, then obviously that's not enough to be able to do cymbals or anything else with a long decay. I did Octobans – which I don't think anyone has ever done on Linn – and then I did all the toms, bass drum, snare and cross-stick (which again I don't think has been done). Then I also did a complete set of backwards toms – I think I'm the only person in the world with those. So then I was in the position where I could set up a complete pattern using backward toms on the Linn. There's no limit to the different sounds you can make up the chips for, and then you just open up the machine and slot them in and use them as you wish."

How come most records done with the Linn have a decent sounding snare?

"What everyone is doing these days is setting up an ordinary snare drum in a stone room, and then putting two drum sticks across the snare drum. Then you place a small speaker, like an Auratone, face down on the sticks so that the speaker is maybe two inches from the snare drum batter head. What they do then is to feed the snare drum sound of the Linn through the speaker so that it's 'banging' on the snare drum in the studio. And then they mike up the snare drum and record that back on to the track as it's being mixed. That's very common these days. All the Heaven 17 stuff, the 'Luxury Gap' album, has the snare drum sound done like that. And when I did it I had the pitch of the Linn signal high, and the actual snare drum tuned low, which gave me a really big, wide sound."

Is the Linndrum any use for live work?

"As it's too expensive to hire a Linn for the length of a tour I put my Linndrum tracks down on to a Revox, and use them that way for playing live – monitoring the Revox through headphones. A lot of the time we use the Linn as a texture thing. We'll vary the mix of the taped and the real drums, having one as the lead of the two with the other underneath, and then changing the roles around, blending the two. So, rather than being blasted with one or the other, it's a changing texture. I think that's a good way of using it. As much as possible I like to use the two together. Same with an electronic drum kit – by using sections of it with real drums I think you can use it to much more advantage; additional sounds at the drummer's disposal.

"Let me make it plain: I'm not a staunch electronic drums supporter. I think some of them are very, very good, but only in their place. There is a place for them, there's no denying that fact, but they will never replace the actual drummer or the acoustic instrument. In fact, the way you have to play the electronic instrument is very restricting. You have to hit them with a certain amount of weight to get the sound, so you're narrowing the way you play. There's so little option in the way you can play an electronic kit."

Is there a machine you'd like to have specially built for you?

"One thing that I do want to do is to get together with a guy called Andy Thomas from Syco Systems, who's a genius with programming, to try some ideas that I've got. I'd like to try to get a one-pad synth-style drum, but with the ability to mix various programmed sounds so you could make new programs from any mix of the other programs, and so on. I don't really know just what is technically possible, so before I talk with Andy Thomas I'm working things out with our keyboard player, Steve Hogarth. He does a lot of synth programming for other people – quite a boffin in that area really – and is a great help with my ideas.

"Don't forget to mention my request for stick manufacturers to put less varnish on the sticks will you?"