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Todd Rundgren live in 2009 © Jean Lannen

As well as touring with the likes of Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band, producing just about every rock staple from New York Dolls to Meat Loaf and being name-dropped and sampled by today's geeky hipsters Simian Mobile Disco and Hot Chip, Todd Rundgren's solo records remain among his most celebrated works. None so more than 1973's seminal A Wizard, A True Star.

As Rundgren prepares to bring his prog opus in its entirety to London's Hammersmith Apollo on 6 February, we caught up with him about what it takes to recreate a classic on stage.

Have you played the whole of the album live before?

TR: "I've never attempted to do the whole thing, although I had done segments of it with backing tapes. But it was never an option to do the entire record until now. The genesis for this idea came from a promoter who had noticed the record was getting a lot of name checks from younger artists, most noticeably Hot Chip, but it seemed it was generally getting discovered by a much wider and younger audience."

"The London show was gonna be the first time we did it, but word got through to my American fans and we thought it wouldn't be right to make them go all the way to England for the premier. So we did about 10 days worth of shows in the US last September, which was probably a good thing."

"[A Wizard, A True Star] was getting a lot of name checks from younger artists, most noticeably Hot Chip, but it seemed it was generally getting discovered by a much wider and younger audience"

"If I'd had to mount the show for the first time in a town in another country that I wasn't so familiar with, I might not have had the support mechanism in place that I would have in America."

Did the US run help iron out any problems you might have had? The whole undertaking seems quite a challenge.

TR: "Well, it was a challenge, but that was fairly soluble by making sure I had the right group of musicians. I had to get the right band around me, but we also had the advantage of technological evolutions over the last 30 years or so."

"There was no way I could have played the whole record live around the time it first came out. There are so many sounds that would have been difficult to reproduce back in the day."

Can you give any specific examples of that?

TR: "Not really, because I kind of cheated along the way. We have samplers nowadays, so it was easy for me to go back to the original master tape and lift any sound I wanted off it. We did that a bit, here and there, but not too extensively. We were able to get fairly close to most of the instruments without recourse to that."

"In some cases there are sounds or treatments to instruments where we no longer have access to the original devices, but I don't what to give too much away. I don't want to dissect what we've done before the London audience has a chance to hear it."

Next: recruiting the band and "anti-conceptual and neo-Dadaism"

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