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Rundgren chilling circa 1988 © Ed Kashi/CORBIS

How did you recruit the band for these shows?

TR: "I think one of my most astute decisions was to get Greg Hawkes from The Cars to play a lot of the synthesizer parts, because he actually owns a lot of the same instruments I used in the studio back in 1973. I don't have them any more, I parted company with most of them over the years, but Greg is more than capable of reproducing most of the peculiar noises!"

"The concept of the album was actually anti-conceptual, a kind of neo-Dadaism. There weren't supposed to be a lot of standard rules, and if there were you were free to break them"

"It was also great to get Kasim Sulton on bass and Prairie Prince on drums, because although they weren't on the record it kind of gives the fans a little Utopia reunion, a little added bonus. We've also got Ralph Schuckett on keyboards, which is a nice link to the original record."

You've said in the past that you don't like the record being described as a concept album. Why is that?

TR: "The concept of the album was actually anti-conceptual, a kind of neo-Dadaism. There weren't supposed to be a lot of standard rules, and if there were you were free to break them. There was a method to the madness, in a way. I'd made Something/Anything? the year before and had got three hit singles from it, but I didn't want to be an artist who'd found a formula for success and just carried on mining it."

"I was already making more money as a producer. It was never in my mind to build myself and comfortable and commercial base, to become a household name. Critics were starting to refer to me as the male Carole King, and as much as I love Carole King I didn't want to be marginalised in such a way."

Rundgren in the kitchen, 1983 © Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis

"Aside from that, I was just thinking differently about the possibilities of the studio and what habits I'd developed as a songwriter - and if it was possible for me to escape those habits. The studio shouldn't be a place where you go to just record your songs, it should be approached as a musical instrument itself and you owe it to yourself to explore the possibilities it holds."

"Making A Wizard... helped me realise that there doesn't have to be a standard song format, that the music you make doesn't have to even be musical in the traditional sense. I just wanted to utilise the sounds of my own environment, like the sounds of my dogs fighting with each other, for example."

"To continue recording standard songs would have been like filling in a form. There's more to life than a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus about a relationship that went bad. I'd done that, it was time to do something different."

Next: something for the "hardcore fans"

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