"MTV makes me want to smoke crack," sang Mr Hansen back in the early 90s. Slightly ironic then that his colourful, bonkers and heavily rotated videos ended up making him the poster boy for that very channel. On the eve of the release of his latest album, Beck talks puppets, bad TV commercials and major label experimentation.

Beck's music, with its collage of many musical styles, almost nonsensical lyrics and arrangements incorporating samples, drum machines, live instrumentation and sound effects was among the most idiosyncratic of 90s alternative rock. His music couldn't be easily categorised but his experiments with different genres led to comparisons with Prince. When 'Loser' was released, a few critics labelled him and the single as novelties. In spite of being completely unique, Beck's music was totally 90s and a product of the media age.

The founders of Bong Load Custom Records, Tom Rothrock and Bob Schnapf discovered Beck, signing him to their fledgling label. 'Loser', a collaboration between hip hop producer Carl Stephenson and Beck, created a sensation on alternative radio and MTV that led to a frenzied bidding war between labels to sign Beck. Eventually he chose Geffen Records, who offered him terms that included an allowance for the release of independent albums while under contract. In 1994, the official debut release of 'Mellow Gold', culled from sessions with Rothrock, Schnapf and Stephenson, and it's catchy, nihilistic chorus "soy un perdidor, I’m a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?" made Beck a mainstream smash success; it also led to his status as an icon for the slacker generation.

When it came to recording the follow-up to 'Mellow Gold', he enlisted the Bong Load boys as producers and cut an album of moody, low-key acoustic numbers to showcase his songwriting, hoping to distance him from the 'Loser' stereotype. Eventually having a change of heart and shelving the album, Beck was introduced to the Dust Brothers, producers of the Beastie Boys' album 'Paul's Boutique', whose cut and paste, sample-heavy production suited Beck's vision of a more fun, accessible album. This resulted in 1996's 'Odelay' which could definitely put the one-hit wonder label to rest. 'Where It’s At' was the lead single with it's "I've got two turntables and a microphone" refrain. Within the year, 'Odelay' had been featured on best of year lists aplenty and was pretty much hailed as a classic of sorts.

The Nigel Godrich-produced 'Mutations' followed in 1998. The album was recorded over two weeks, during which Beck recorded one song a day with the sessions producing 14 songs. This album was intended as something to tide fans over until the next proper album and was filled with folk and blues influences. 'Sing it Again' was written for Johnny Cash but Beck considered it "rubbish", Cash would go on to record 'Rowboat' (which originally appeared on 'Stereopathetic Soulmanure').

The official follow-up to 'Odelay' arrived in 1998 in the form of 'Midnite Vultures' - a kind of Beck doing Prince doing Beck cacophony. This saw a return to high energy performances and the live stage set for the tour included a red bed that descended from the ceiling for the song 'Debra' ("I wanna get with you and your sister, I think her name’s Debra").

With Godrich back at the helm, 2002's 'Sea Change' had one unifying theme - the stages following the end of a relationship. It became Beck's first top 10 album in the US and achieved Rolling Stone's rarely awarded five star rating. After the album's release, the tour featured the Flaming Lips as the opening and backing band. His sixth major label album 'Guero' was produced by the Dust Brothers and features a collaboration with Jack White - it marked a return to his 'Odelay'-era sound. 'Girl' was heavily played over the summer of 2004. The song seems to be about summer love but a closer listen to the lyrics reveals a darker side to the song.His latest album 'The Information' took three years to make and the talents of Nigel Godrich were again enlisted. It has been described as "quasi-hip hop."

You're one of the few artists who can play such different styles of music and get away with it.
"I know! It's really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I see musicians who have a (band) name for one thing they do, and then when they do their breakbeat thing it's called something else, and when they do their rock band it’s another name, and when they do their electronic project, it's called something else. But I never really thought about it. I was just always creating and seeing what came out, and I don't think I ever realised that they'd be such a discrepancy. I'd forget because I got so involved in each thing I was doing. But in retrospect, it's all over the place, and I can imagine it being a little disconcerting."

There is always a massive stylistic leap between your albums.
"Yeah, and it gets harder and harder too, because there are albums in between there that don't get made. It’s difficult to put out albums on a more regular basis just because of the way the record company works and the way promotion is, so creatively there is a massive gulf, because there's also 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between. There's a whole evolution from 'Midnite Vultures' to 'Sea Change' that’s never been released: guitar stuff, weird punk stuff. So it's really weird creatively, because you get 10 or 12 songs every two or three years, and you want those songs to work as a whole; like, it wouldn't make sense to put a hip hop song on 'Sea Change'. There were songs I left off that album, too - real raggedy blues stuff, some electronic noisy stuff. It just didn’t fit."

Are you always eager to get back to recording?
"I am. With 'Sea Change' I was planning to tour for just four or five months, but I ended up being out there for a while. And I took a few years before too. I kind of sat out a few years because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it just kind of seemed like a good time to step back. But I did have a backlog of ideas."

Where do you see yourself in the music scene now?

"I have no idea! I really don't see myself anywhere."

How did the collaboration with Jack White on 'Guero' come about?
"He played bass on 'Go It Alone'. I did that Grammys thing - he wanted me to write a little speech for him at the Grammys when they played it, so I did a little freeform poem. Later he just came down to the studio and said, "I wanna play bass!" We messed around for a couple of nights." Why did he play bass? "He plays drums, bass, piano... that’s the way I am in the studio too, and I'm always throwing people on different instruments. I was doing some recording last year and I had my keyboard player on percussion and guitar player on bass... kind of anything goes. You always find interesting things that way. Jack's a helluva bass player by the way."

Do you like trying new stuff, like new recording techniques or instrumentation?
"Well, every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know who did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia - or maybe the road wipes it out. You have to find it again. One thing is, I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that anymore. For a couple of years, I thought I was done with that. It didn't really seem like I needed to do that. It wasn't really required of me. At first I didn't know what I wanted to do with it, because I didn't want to do something typical - like, I think times in the past it seemed like I was kind of making fun of rap a little bit. But it was more me making fun of myself, since I’m not technically a rapper, whatever that means. I'm not from the "Academy of Rapping."

Do you find you have different audiences for your different styles of music - like do you have a "folk" audience for one album and a "hip hop" audience for another?
"Definitely. You see them at the shows. We play a hip hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play 'Lost Cause' or something and they're like, "I don’t know about this one." It's all over the place."

How do you think you've had the luxury to experiment like that? Most major label artists don't have that freedom.

"Just ignorance. Pure ignorance. Bit by bit I'm becoming aware of it, but in the past I was completely unaware that people would listen to my records and have some kind of idea of what I was and have a certain expectation. I was just seeing what came out, trying anything. The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that many other bands have, where they have a real specific idea of what they are and what their sound is, and how they don't do certain things because their fans won't understand it. I didn't have that at all - I had the opposite. But if you have a wide range of taste, you’re just going to gravitate in all directions."

Are there any other styles or genres you would like to explore?
"I would love to do an electronic record. I’ve been calling up Richard James (aka Aphex Twin) for about six years now, trying to get him to do something with me. There’s just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by. The artists that I've really admired were film makers, and film makers are allowed to jump from genre to genre. So I identify with them more than with how a musician is supposed to behave artistically."

Would you say your biggest stylistic leap was from 'Midnite Vultures' to 'Sea Change'?
"Yeah. I did make some effort to bridge 'Sea Change' and 'Guero'. I remember talking to a friend of mine and he was saying, "you know, if there's some way you can channel (the vulnerability and emotion of 'Sea Change') into the next album..." And I told him I was going to do my best. It’s a difficult thing. Music with beats and hip hop elements is good time music, you know? So you start putting heavier concepts over it and it starts to get a little crooked and off-balance. But it was definitely something I wanted to try."

Is that because you got some criticisms for 'Midnite Vultures'?
"Oh yeah! I got reprimanded. I got sent to the principal’s office many times for that record. It got a good reaction in Europe, but I felt like I ran into a lot of confusion in the States. I thought of the whole thing as a satire - one of the titles I was thinking of for the album was 'Satiricon'. To me, it was like, if the world was going to end in 1999, which is what everyone was talking about at the time, what would the time capsule be? So I was riffing off all the stuff that was happening at the time. I wanted it to sound like Captain Beefheart produced by Puff Daddy. That was my grand concept. But I think people didn't get it."

Are there any of your songs you got sick of hearing?

"I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like 'Where It's At'. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years. It's pretty much impossible to clear samples now. We had to stay away from samples as much as possible. The ones that we did use were just absolutely integral to the feeling or the rhythm of the song. But, back then, it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies and stuff, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it's prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70% of the song and $50, 000. That’s where sampling has gone, and that’s why hip hop sounds the way it does now."

After Beck's appearance at this year's V festival, he was forced to apologise to Radiohead after his stage marionettes allegedly trashed their hotel room. The marionettes are also featured in a film between the end of his performance and the encore. "Yeah, we apologised to Radiohead for that. But y'know - what can we do? They're puppets." It’s good to have Beck back.

THE ALBUM 'THE INFORMATION' IS AVAILABLE NOW AND THE SINGLE 'CELL PHONE’S DEAD' WILL BE RELEASED ON OCTOBER 9TH.

WORDS: LYNSEY HOSKINS