“The hotel staff here, they’re real characters, eh?”

Jamie Lidell is chilling in Belgium on the eve of his upcoming European tour. To get through to the man, I’ve dialled three different numbers and two passwords, been told to hang up and call back in ten minutes and dealt with a concierge who sounds pretty much like Borat, assuming Borat was Belgian.

It would be weird, if it wasn’t Jamie Lidell on the line. Stuck between the worlds of rock, soul, glitch-techno and funk, Lidell is pretty much the epitome of weird. His new “most lyrically personal record I’ve ever done”, Compass, takes all the sounds he’s conquered previously and puts them on the same disc, and it’s pretty much as free-wheeling when it comes to collaborators.

“I worked with Beck for about ten days, with Chris Taylor from Grizzly Bear for about two weeks, and the rest of it we did at Feist’s house and the rest I put together at my studio apartment in New York.” Lidell says this all matter-of-factly, as if entirely unaware that he’s namedropped enough talent to make the average music aficionado cringe with envy.

It wasn’t a relaxing, hang-with-the-indie-heavyweights process; indeed Lidell likens it to “holding on for dear life to the horns of some fucking wild beast.” Compass was put to bed in just over five months. And now he’s back in Belgium, fending off foreign concierge jokes.

One of the biggest drawcards for Lidell fans this time around was the premature revelation that Jamie would be working with Beck as his producer on the record. Lidell, however, is quick to clarify that the sessions with Beck “didn’t actually work out, in the end.” Is this the biggest battle of the music egos since the Gallagher brothers dissed practically everyone? Not quite. On the track Coma Chameleon, Beck “wanted to work maybe more as a writer with me,” Lidell explained, “but with this album in particular I think it was very important that I wrote it. So I needed to part company with him quite early on in the process.”

Luckily, while Lidell continued on his path of self-awareness, his other collaborators managed to stay in his circle while staying out of his way. “To be honest, it was me and my girlfriend who ended up making a lot of the production and songwriting decisions,” Lidell says. “It’s an interesting process. Sometimes you don’t know what the hell’s going on.” He then proceeds to let loose the most bizarre metaphor ever relayed long-distance. “That’s where the compass comes in. I was kind of thinking that I should just go with my instinct, go with my gut, you know? Just, fuck it. If you’re in the middle of a storm and you’ve got your boat and you’ve got your sails, you just have to deal with it, don’t you?”

Short of creating his own Perfect Storm, Lidell also managed to find time to have an existential crisis (“Oh, what am I trying to say here? Have I really got anything to say?”) and solve it somewhat by having a spontaneous group writing session. “It was actually Feist’s idea,” says Lidell. “We just sat around the table, Beck, Feist, my girlfriend and I and she [Feist] said suddenly, ‘Why don’t we all grab a paper and pen and write a verse each?’” The result, a chimerical, five-minute opus called Big Drift, is probably as close to folk-hippie as Lidell’s going to get.

Lidell and Feist have an interesting relationship. He worked on her last album, The Reminder, but he doesn’t blame me for not knowing that. “I’m credited as an ‘Energy Arranger’ on that record. It’s pretty vague. I was kind of…a producer, of sorts.”

Thus she was all too happy to welcome Lidell onto her sprawling Niagara ranch in Canada for the production phase with Chris Taylor. “To be honest,” Lidell says cheekily, “She owed me one. It was about time she was my Energy Producer.” It turns out Feist wasn’t even there. “She was doing other stuff. But we have the same manager, you see, so she didn’t even have to give me the keys.”

So Jamie Lidell has survived life in a tumble-dryer of musical celebrities and come out with an album that still sounds at least five-sixths like him. How did that happen? “Well part of the learning experience of this album is that when you have a good idea, be adamant about keeping it and try not to let people persuade you otherwise,” he says, “especially when there are other powerful and influential idea-people around.”

Jamie Lidell’s new album Compass is out now. Read the review on inthemix.