Interview: John Squire - Musician

IT'S the eve of John Squire's latest exhibition opening, his first in Scotland. Is he looking forward to it? "No," he says firmly. "I like seeing the work, it really transforms when it's taken out of the studio, a background of chaos, and gets put into a clean, white environment where it can be seen as a collection. It's this desire to…"

• Picture: Phil Wilkinson

He pauses, a recurring characteristic of his speech. It's an endearing trait when you get used to it. Squire conserves his energy and thought, doesn't feel the need to fill silence with empty gabbling, and only speaks when he knows exactly what he wants to say.

"… expose yourself," he continues eventually, "for want of a better phrase, I don't understand." Would he be happier to let his art speak for itself, to not have to explain it? "Well, it does that for most of its life. But no artist likes (opening night] and everyone has to do it, unless you're Lucian Freud." Another pause. "I'm not a social animal who can be dropped in the middle of a room and make conversation with strangers for a few hours. It's not that I dislike people. It's just that it's not my natural habitat." As he explains, Squire feels most at home in the studio he keeps a few minutes' walk from his Cheshire home.

While it can sometimes seem as if his occupation for the best part of the last decade has been fielding ever more feverish media enquiries about if and when his old band, the much-loved and era-defining Stone Roses, will reform (Squire has categorically stated it will never happen in no less a forum of public record than Newsnight), he has actually spent the last few years moving away from his career as a musician and into the full-time life of an artist. He has form in this area, having designed every record sleeve for the Roses, his subsequent project the Seahorses and both of his solo albums.

The career change is going well. Earlier this year a selection of books in Penguin's Decades series was released with Squire-designed covers, while his work is in increasing demand for gallery exhibitions around the world.

He does see the irony, though, in signing off his recorded career possibly for good with an album, Marshall's House, inspired by Edward Hopper paintings, and coming to this year's Edinburgh Art Festival with a series of works influenced by the Miles Davis album Nefertiti.

"I don't usually play music in my studio," he says, "but it was late December, early January, so I was working in the house and the music happened to be on. At the time I was cutting lino blocks, trying out ideas for Penguin, and the shapes seemed to somehow fit the music.

Essentially the pieces use these lino blocks as a skeleton, an unplayable coded guitar tab buried within the work, and then I've painted over the top of them."

Squire says it feels more natural creating art than writing music now, although he doesn't necessarily rank one over the other: it seems more that he finds it easier to be prolific as an artist.

"My urge to create has been there since childhood, "and I think that informed the desire to make music," he says. "Both my parents were very creative, my mum did ceramics and oil painting at night school and my dad was an engineer. He always used to make us toys and castles and go-karts. We went through a strange gladiatorial phase where he made us Roman helmets and leather skirts out of brown PVC. The idea that you can do it yourself, I think, I picked up from seeing him do it habitually.

"I only did art A-level," he says, "and I failed it academically. There was far too much art history, which I now recognise is important, but I also resented them a bit for keeping the work. I quite liked it, I took some photos of a burned-out garage near where I lived and stuck painted sandpaper on. I'd have kept them in return for the fail mark." Nevertheless, the DIY aesthetic he learned from his dad has now brought him as far as a second dream career.

Although his PR has gently suggested we steer away from the same old question about a hypothetical Stone Roses reformation in our interview, it would seem churlish to mention it, quite frankly. Squire is obviously reinvigorated by the task of creating art every minute of the daylight hour and, as he stated categorically in that Newsnight interview, "I'd rather live my life than attempt to rehash it." Better to ask, perhaps, is he glad that the memory of the Stone Roses survived the 2000s, the decade of endless money-spinning reformations, with reputation and integrity intact?

After the longest pause of the interview, he simply states: "I don't want to be one of those people. I'm very cynical whenever a band does reform, and I couldn't look my wife in the eye if I did it after making all the comments I have. There's plenty of people making music, anyway. I know I'd be livid if I was a 20-year-old trying to get somewhere, and all these old f***ers were coming back and getting my gigs."

The other striking quote of that Newsnight chat was "making music is a young person's game", and the beauty is that a 47-year-old artist is quite entitled to believe their career is still in its early days. "Yeah, I'm back in the van, and it feels great," laughs Squire. "Day to day, I've never been happier than I am now."

• John Squire: Nefertiti is at the Henderson Gallery, Edinburgh, until 19 August.z