I’ve been listening to Herbert’s sublime album Bodily Functions for the last year or so. And I’d thought the album was a small, obscure gem that had made it through the system. I didn’t know that Matthew Herbert has been one of the most prolific musical forces of the last decade. I didn’t know that he also worked under the monikers of Wish Mountain, Radioboy and Doctor Rockit, producing works on different musical fringes and selling bucketloads of albums in the process. Here is a musician who has managed to achieve substantial success without even attempting to engage in the fame game. Herbert rejects the notion of celebrity. “What for?” is his response. He’s perfectly happy to exist on the fringe, selling nearly half a million albums thus far, entirely on his own terms and his own record label. He owns the copyright to his own work and reckons that he’s managed to construct a commercial career entirely free from compromise. Which, in the world of recorded music, is an extremely rare achievement. Additionally, although his central passion is the sampler, he never samples anybody else’s tunes, insisting on always providing sounds fresh from the real world, be they the notes from a flugelhorn or the rustling of a packet of chips.

I spoke to Herbert a few days before he arrived in South Africa to perform at the North Sea Jazz Festival with musical partners in crime Phil Purnell and Danni Siciliano as well as Dave O’Higgins and Pete Wraight, all of whom will perform as the Matthew Herbert band.

Peter Machen: I’d like to know more about your aversion to using existing sounds.

Matthew Herbert: To me it’s a perfectly logical thing. I don’t understand why I should even consider using sounds that have been used before. When I could use any sound in the world, why would I use a sound that my next-door-neighbour has already chosen. Even if I fail, my quest is to be original and that’s my starting point. If it’s a sound that’s already been recorded, then I’m taking five steps back before I take one step forward.

PM: Do you ever play to audiences who simply don’t get what you’re up to?

MH: I don’t really know. You need to ask the audiences that. I did a show as Radioboy last year where I was working with McDonalds and Coca Cola and some other products of society that are destructive forces, and sort of destroying them on stage and using the sounds of a Big Mac meal to make a live piece of music. And I got asked a lot about what the audience thought about it. And to be honest, it’s not really something that concerns me, in the sense that the music is obvious to me. I’m trying to go about these things in sometimes very obvious ways, sometimes very subtle ways. And you can only do that and hope an audience understands or corresponds or discovers something. I mean you can’t create something that’s easy for an audience. You know – you don’t want to dumb down. I think that’s the problem with a lot of culture.