UNCUT: LOW is Generally perceived as David at his most emotionally honest, but most unhappy. Looking back, is this interpretation accurate?

tv: I wasn't a difficult album to make, we were freewheeling, making our own rules. But David was going through a difficult period professionally and personally. To his credit, he didn't put on a brave face. His music said that he was "low."

UNCUT: Is it true that Chateau d'Herouville was haunted by the ghosts of Chopin and George Sand (David refused to sleep in master bedroom 'cos it was spooked? Eno woken by taps on the shoulder in the middle of the night?). Any good ghostly happenings you recall?

tv: I keep reviewing my feelings about the supernatural. There was certainly some strange energy in that chateau. On the first day David took one look at the master bedroom and said, "I'm not sleeping in there!" He took the room next door. The master bedroom had a very dark corner, right next to the window, ironically, that seem to just suck light into it. It was colder in that corner too. I took the bedroom because I wanted to test my meditation abilities. I never admitted this before. I had read that Buddhists in Tibet meditated all night in a graveyard to test their level of fear/no fear. Milarepa, the Tibetan saint, sat on his dead mother's body all night and meditated. It felt like it was haunted as all fuck, but what could Frederic and George really do to me, scare me in French? I loved the look of the room so I decided to spend one night there. If something happened I planned to shout so loud I'd wake up the village.

Eno claims he was awakened early every morning with someone shaking his shoulder. When he opened his eyes no one was there.

UNCUT: There are rumours that Robert Fripp was involved on 'Low', but uncredited. Was he?

tv: He wasn't there, ever. Only Ricky Gardiner, David and Carlos Alomar played guitar on Low.

UNCUT: Rumour also has it that an alternative version exists with different lyrics - is this true, and if so, why?

tv: I remember David wrote a third verse to "Always Crashing In The Same Car" and sang it in the style of Bob Dylan. It was done half in jest, but we were a little freaked because Dylan had just been in that motorcycle accident and this seemed like bad taste, I guess. David asked me to erase it and I did. I can't recall there being any alternative lyrics to any other songs.

UNCUT: There's a story about Dennis Davis recounting a tale (during 'Low' sessions) of being thrown out of the army after seeing a UFO crash. What do you remember of this, if at all?

tv: Dennis was the life of the party. He could do a mime act on the closed-circuit-tv camera and have us in stitches. He claimed he took a short cut through a highly classified hanger and saw a crashed UFO from the catwalk he was on. He stared at it for ages until a guard told him to leave because he wasn't classified to be there. He was warned not to ever mention what he saw. I don't know if this is true, but it was highly entertaining. French tv sucks, Dennis is the best we had.

UNCUT: There's a credit on 'Low' for Peter and Paul. Is this to do with Mary being there? And who were they really?

tv: Brian and Mary sang the "doo-doos" in the beginning of "Sound and Vision." Mary and our kids were there for a couple of weeks.

UNCUT: Does it still annoy you that some people still think Eno produced the 'Berlin' albums?

tv: Yes. David's set the record straight many times since, and of course my name is in the credits as co-producer with David. How rock journalists continue to make that mistake is beyond me. Come to think of it, I don't recall Brian ever setting the record straight. I know that David and Brian spent some time together before going in the studio with me, but they were writing. Brian spent an average of three weeks on each the Triptych albums recording his bits. He wasn't present for the vocals, lots of other overdubs and the mix.

UNCUT: I've always thought that there's a prevailing mood of hope throughout 'Low' (certainly not a pessimistic album). Do you think that comes through?

tv: I find "Warzawa" very uplifting. Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click. I remember after a couple of weeks of recording I made a rough mix of the entire album so far and handed a cassette of it to David. He left the control room waving the cassette over his head and grinned ecstatically saying, "We've got an album, we've got an album." I have to qualify that statement by saying that at the beginning, the three of us agreed to record with no promise that Low would ever be released. David had asked me if I didn't mind wasting a month of my life on this experiment if it didn't go well. Hey, we were in a French chateau for the month of August and the weather was great!

UNCUT: Is it true that, when David asked what your Eventide Harmonizer did, you blurted "It messes with the fabric of time!"? How revolutionary do you think that sound was you created? And its influence in later years?

tv: I actually said, "It fucks with the fabric of time," much to the delight of David and Brian, who were on a conference call with me at the time. I must've been quoted in a family magazine.

It was a radical sound, especially on the drums. I had the second Harmonizer in Europe and I guessed it would be a matter of time before other producers figured out what I was doing. But when the album came out the Harmonizer still wasn't widely available. I had loads of producers phoning me and asking what I had done, but I wouldn't tell them. I asked, instead, how they thought I did it and I got some great answers that I found inspirational. One producer insisted I compressed the drum tracks three separate times and slowed the tape down every time, or something like that. I also used the Harmonizer to great effect on some vocals, but especially on side two.

I've heard hundreds of "Low sounds" on other records since.

UNCUT: You've described recording 'Low' as pretty horrible. Do you remember much of the various incidents (food poisoning, French press infiltration, etc.)?

tv: In August most of Europe goes on holiday. This studio was no exception. The service was terrible. After three days I noticed that the sound got duller and duller and I asked my assistant, a lovely English chap, when was the last time the multitrack recorder was lined up? He said about a week before we arrived then the technician went on holiday. My assistant was brand new, hired just for us because he could speak English and French. He didn't know how to maintain the machines. So every morning I'd go into the control room with him and we'd line up the machine together, with the manual open, hoping for the best.

The food was appalling. For the first three days they served nothing but rabbit and no vegetables. I was starving. When I asked for a little salad or something, they plopped six heads of lettuce on the table with a bottle each of vinegar and oil, plus more rabbit.

We would get ravenous at night so we'd eat this cheese that they left out uncovered since dinner. David and I got food poisoning as a result. Even the French doctor couldn't be bothered to look at me because I got out of bed to request that he see me after David. He said, "He's okay, he can walk!" David shared his medicine with me.

A French woman was hired to be our assistant. She was supposed to provide us with anything we might need to make the recording go smoothly, but even she couldn't be bothered to bring some bread, cheese and wine up to the studio when we called down for some at 1 a.m. (a normal working hour for a rock studio). I remember David getting the owner out of bed at that hour and saying in precise, measured out words, "We want some bread, some cheese and some wine in the studio ? now! What, you're asleep? Excuse me, but I thought you were running a studio.

UNCUT: What impressed you initially with Ricky Gardiner?

tv: He was totally left-field and completely savvy with special effects. I was in awe of him.

"HEROES"