'United States Parts I-IV' in its natural, live setting (films, slides, music, performer herself almost as prop) carried a range of hinted possibilities, thought provoking context shifts and enough of the Charlie Chaplin (trademark of a thousand other interviews subject in ill fitting suit, neon violin bow taking place of walking stick) in Laurie to leave an audience both stunned and laughing.

The LP 'Big Science' and the relentless wedge of 'Oh Superman' which preceded it were, as records per se, oddities. Possessed of a shadowy black and white sparseness they lingered. Strangely.

By the time 'Big Science' was released here, Laurie was already thinking of ways to make what might be termed a ‘record’ record.

To wit: 'Master Heartbreak'. (That title! See cuttings of 60s girl groups scattered over floor and Laurie Anderson in black leather on back of motorbike riding across them.)

"This LP was the first time I'd actually written something for a record. On 'Big Science' I thought of it as a kind of documentation. I thought reverb was cheating! I thought it should sound like it's coming direct from the board as in performance without the audience noise. And I thought that would make it more intimate too in a way.

"It came out as the opposite, cardboardy. I changed my mind, decided that reverb wasn't cheating and I really wanted things to be airy. 'Blue Lagoon' and 'Langue D’amour' were from the 'United States' series but the others I wrote in the summer right before recording. They were specifically for the disc. And that was so different."

WEA international. Rockefeller Plaza. Midtown Manhattan. Roughly the 26th floor. Laurie and I are hanging upside down from the rafters in the presidents office. Raw fish, croissants and other nibbles on the table below.

Seeing 'United States' after hearing 'Big Science' definitely opened up (rather than 'explained') the intricacies of the songs there. On 'Mister Heartbreak' they are maybe more self-contained.

"I always got real distracted on 'Big Science' thinking about the pictures for the songs. Even with 'Blue Lagoon' in the performance there's a film of palm trees and a kind of animation with water and the bottle that washes up ashore – 'I got your letter thanks a lot'. It always seemed important to me that you didn’t just pop down to your mail box, that the letter came with driftwood on the beach. The picture and the sound were made at the same time.

"With the other songs I now have the opposite problem. They’re unplayable if I want to perform them. Something like 'Sharkey's Day' has all these animals: mosquitoes, frogs, dogs and birds. That’s too much many cages to have on stage. My tour manager does not like the idea of rattling cages, animal acts are not really his thing."

But a short step to imagine Laurie with ringmaster’s hat and whip. Or chair in hand taming a lion that growls on a screen behind her.

"It’s already enough like a circus because there are all these film projectors going on. I’m really just starting to think ‘how can I translate this stuff? How can six people go on tour and play it although there will be two synclaviers? I did a lot of the record on synclavier, it has many typical synthesiser voices and also a mode whereby you can take any sound in the world and place it on the keyboard.

"I did that for the birds and for Phoebe Snow who was sampled then played with the vibrato slowed right down. The whistles on 'Sharkey's Day' are actually an ocarina sampled way up then played right down.

"What I've been working on recently is an interface which puts all that stuff onto the violin. It's a prototype, just a stick really but weighted and shaped with a couple of the curves that you need on a violin, a solid bodied violin. There are about twenty of the things that classical violinists are using to experiment with string action."

A tour, a virtual globe spanner, has already trekked across the USA and, as you read this, will be heading for Japan. It arrives in the UK in October, coming via Russia where Laurie is partaking surprising anti nuclear thing with, more surprise, Harry Belafonte (“We were recording in different studios in the same building, a channel on the mixing desk kept picking up 'day-oooo'...").

"I'm working on Japanese translations of the songs, they sound really funny. That's an amazing language, it's so pitched it's almost sung. It's very musical and percussive.

"Apparently they're quite careful about things sound. The diagrams of the theatre there are obsessively accurate. You know exactly where every little output is.

"The real limitations of the show are really sight lines. There's an ideal sized place to do the show. I'm re designing the projection system make it brighter, we've had a lot of trouble dim shadowy things in the past. They were too vague."

Vague or no, at London’s Adelphi Theatre in summer of 1982, the two hour long show of excerpts from 'United States' struck my mind like a forked prong of lightning to the nape of the neck (heady! prickly! spew!).

Half-a-year later, the Dominion housed the whole eight-hour behemoth (thought the actual running time was only five and a half hours). Save for 'Language Is A Virus' (a hit single if only... ), the event was spectacularly boring. The essential bits were too often blotted out by the apparently aimless semiological clowning.

"It was rather long really. I did that in Zurich as well. I think it was the first time they'd had a midnight concert in the whole history of Zurich. People were nodding off in the middle. It was a very special event for me because I love being up at night. It was very intimate. They were great, the ones that were awake that is."

Laurie has this cute way of avoiding direct confrontation and slipping into anecdote answer a question. And I let her do this y’know (we've met before, I've learnt to). Laurie’s anecdotes are usually several notches more interesting than the norm.

Possibly a fact: 'Mister Heartbreak' seem a 'record' record because it has record people on it. Names that crop up while scanning LP racks.

Like Adrian Belew:

"I met Adrian back stage at a concert I did in Chicago. I'd just gotten this koto and he yelled ‘ah, koto' and although he'd never played before just started playing this amazing thing and said if you ever want me to play on an album give me a call. I though a koto solo might be great. He said 'oh yeah, I'll bring my guitar too’.

"On this record I've had to take back a lot of the stuff I've been blabbering about for a while. I always remember saying how much I hate sound of guitars, bass and drums and that I’d never put those things on a record but on this record all those things are there. I feel sorta stupid. Still, I don't have that much pride and I’m wrong a lot of the time – so I take it back.

"Adrian changed a lot of the things by playing on them. On 'Sharkey's Day' I asked him to some things to integrate the violin and horn but he did these chords and some solos that integrated them so well that I threw away violin and horn lines.

"I learned a lot about how to make a record. I think I really started getting the hang of terms of digital sound with 'KoKoKu', which the last thing to be recorded. That's the where I figured out well enough how to things and keep it loose enough so it wasn't just yammering away with the beat."

Like Peter Gabriel: "He'd be working away for ages over a keyboard and I'd wonder what on earth he was doing. Then suddenly he'd do it, have some arrangement totally worked out and I'd think 'oh, that's what he was doing!'."

Like Bill Laswell: "I met him when I did this little violin thing on a Nona Hendryx record. The first time I'd actually played on somebody else's record. There was a real atmosphere of ease in the studio with Bill sitting there with his baseball cap which he never takes off. Don Van Vliet saw his hat and commented 'that guy needs a hat transplant'! We'd try to get him to take if off by giving him complicated head sets. I dunno what's under that hat, he's very inscrutable."

And less commonly found on wax . . . William Burroughs (whose new book I bought in the street in Greenwich Village. Hardback copy. Eight dollars. Snip):

"Because I love his voice and because he's ... somebody I really ... admire and er, like, he's the grandfather of a lot of people. Because he's a hero. I was very happy when he said yes. What I really wanted to do was a duet with Burroughs and Captain Beefheart with a banjo break by Pete Seeger but it didn't quite work out.

"Burroughs and I were going to do an acapella thing, we still might some time. He's one of the most amazing people I've ever met. We'd be walking around at six in the morning downtown and there's grassy patches sticking up through the cracks in the sidewalk, he'd go 'Ugh! I thought I saw Brer Rabbit there for a second'. I wondered what it would be like working in the studio with a guy who sees Brer Rabbit popping up behind the console every once in a while.

"I didn't know if it would work but he's amazing in the studio, a tyrant, a real intuitive.

"On this record we tried not to draw any lines of how anything should sound or who should play on it. All of the songs are about to fall apart and I like having them just shaking on the edge like that. Not finding their groove, ever.

"The songs are pretty long, sometimes I guess you just wonder when they're ever going to end. I think of six-and-a-half minutes as being a good length because that's three prints of film and I usually print that much film for a song. For a radio or anything it's ridiculous but I think for listening time it's just nice."

I had been up all night wondering what could possibly be lifted off as a single.

"Yeah, I guess I should have thought of that when I was making it. But I can never predict that kind of thing. I know that some black stations are playing 'Sharkey's Night', the track with Burroughs on. That's strange."

Ah, a cross cultural listening post! To which most of 'Mister Heartbreak' would admirably lend itself. It pulls on the strings of various 'ethnic' musics as much as it plucks at the workings of 'rock' songs.

"I spent a lot of the time while working on the LP at this Cuban club on 100th and Broadway. They play straight Cuban music, nothing to do with salsa or music from the Dominica Republic. But it is amazing music. It has keyboard lines that are really jagged but precise, ten percussionists with polyrhythms that would put any other New York musician to shame.

"It's not written about because it's Spanish third world and dance music so it's not considered serious. To me it's the most interesting music in New York now.

"The dancing's amazing, especially the men because they look like they're sitting at a desk from the waist up. It's hip action and foot action the women follow along – machismo is not for girls, we can partner the men but not do anything fancy. Also it's about the only place in New York where you can put your purse on a table, go and dance and come back and find your purse still there.

"You'd love it, Mick. Go to the door and as for Geoffrey. You have to wear a suit.”

Regrettably I forgot to pack the whistle.

"Well, you can borrow mine if you like."

And walk around New York looking like Charlie Chaplin?

No chance!