As he releases his first album of songs in 30 years, pioneering musician Brian Eno tells Jim Carroll about how technical advances have endangered the honourable craft of songwriting - and why he absolutely hates playing live

Every time Brian Eno grins - and he does grin a lot - a gold tooth flashes. It's a somewhat incongruous touch in a man who probably abandoned bling when he hung up his Roxy Music platforms and ostrich feathers. But Eno didn't become pop's most erudite and fascinating character by worrying about consistency.

These days, from an understated mews in a quiet, leafy part of west London, Eno roams far and wide in search of the next big idea. An average day may involve producing records (Paul Simon was a recent client); collaborating with such rabble-rousers as Algeria's Rachid Taha or Ireland's Damien Dempsey; playing keyboards on a new Coldplay track; canvassing in the recent British General Election; or delivering lectures on "Is the art school dead?"

Eno and his helpers must have remarkable time-management skills. Today, there's an hour put aside for this interview before he takes the train to Oxford. Ostensibly he's plugging a new album, Another Day on Earth, but, once a few perfunctory questions are answered, Eno never again brings up the new release. It's done and dusted, time to move on.

Not that there's anything amiss with the record, mind. Indeed, Another Day on Earth, Eno's first album of songs since 1974's Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), is quite brilliant, a reminder of his melodic and dramatic sensibilities. He may be best known for his pioneering ambient symphonies and producing other band's greatest hits, but the new record shows that Eno is no slouch when it comes to songs.

He believes that songwriting is perhaps a musician's greatest challenge, now that technology has made everything else much easier to do. "This thing here," he says, pointing to an Apple Mac behind him, "comes with 200 drum loops and bass loops. You can quickly sling something together which doesn't sound too bad but which is not necessarily very good.

"The difficult job is thinking about whether there should be a figure in this landscape you have created, a voice. It's more difficult to think about what it says or what it does or who it is. There are no technological solutions to that, so people leave it out or do it badly or they are great songwriters like Bowie."

Eno has plenty to say about how technology has changed music production and consumption. He points to how "advances in technology allowed me to do things with voices which I never could before" when recording the new album.

Then there's the digital music revolution. "Anyone thinking about the future is always surprised by how slowly it comes around," says Eno with a smile. "But then there are things like the iPod revolution, which happened much faster than I thought. The MP3 technology also surprised me by catching on as quickly as it did."

Yet he feels it has come at a cost. "We are all prepared to accept worse and worse quality in our listening. I have an iPod Shuffle which I like listening to and it sounds fine. Then I put on a record and listen to it through very good speakers and I realise what the difference is. It's like the difference between very good bought food and stuff you just got out of the garden. All that freshness and depth of flavour, it's more like music.

"I don't think people have realised they have sacrificed so much. It happened in film with the shift from Technicolor to Eastman colour and Hollywood became Hollywoodified and less interesting. The same thing happened with record production. It lost faith in music. It replaced its faith in music with a faith in sheen and gloss."

Eno has lately found himself listening to a lot of bands that sound remarkably like one of his previous clients. "The resurgence of bands in the last few years who sound like Talking Heads is astonishing to me," he says. "I thought that would have happened years ago. Talking Heads was such a good idea for a band and it's an idea which is duplicable. But why didn't they get there before? It took such a long time."

Few of these acts truly impress him. "I like some of it because it has a certain passion and brightness to it, but I want more than that." But there was one act that stopped him in his tracks.

"I have been listening to a band recently called The Books and they make me fucking angry. I think 'I should have done that!'. That's when I know I am really impressed by something. Some of their things are a bit of a mess, but the best things they've done are absolutely outstanding. It puts everything else in the shade. That's the benchmark, that kind of originality and attention to detail."

One reason why Eno is drawn to The Books is their attempt to unite the two distinct strands he sees prevalent in contemporary music.

"You have these two plateaus that hardly ever talk to each other, the guitar band plateau and the guys in their bedrooms with computers. The guitar bands have all the excitement of performance and a community of people working together. But they benefit nothing from advances in technology, save a few effects pedals or getting the engineer to fix up a bad verse in Pro Tools. The other world has completely sacrificed everything about performance. You look at this and think 'come on you idiots, look across and start talking'. I'm always looking for people who exist between those two plateaus."

For Eno himself, performance holds absolutely no appeal. He enjoyed a recent rare on-stage appearance in St Petersburg with Rachid Taha, but that was enough. This is one man who will not be going back on the road.

"I have never missed anything less - I miss it like you miss a toothache. There is something so unsatisfactory about the actual sonic aspects of most performances. Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad . . . The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking."

Working with Taha has rekindled his interest in Arabic music. "During the '70s, I was really into Arabic music and kept saying this is the next thing. It didn't happen, so I began to think I was wrong. A lot of those Arabic voices on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts all came out of that period of listening to a lot of Arabic music."

Now, though, he finds he's not the only producer alert to Arabic sounds. "I'm hearing it coming out more on American r'n'b records. There was a Beyoncé track recently that had a clear Arabic lift in it and there was something similar on a Kylie Minogue track."

While Eno is obviously excited about the possibilities inherent in such cultural exchanges, he's none too enthusiastic about his homeland. He calls it "America-lite" and talks about "a whole population of people who are entertained into total stupefaction".

"I have a flat on Ladbroke Grove, and some evenings when I look out the window, I see televisions on as far as I can see. These are all posh middle-class people around me, they have every cultural option open to them. Yet they are just watching TV. I don't have a TV, but I know if I did, I would be one of those people."

The gold tooth flashes once again. "TV is the path of least resistance, and you can always convince yourself that watching Celebrity Love Island is an important key to understanding where the culture is at the moment. You can talk yourself into it.

"Basically, it's laziness, and the British have become really lazy." And that's a charge which can never be levelled at Eno.

Another Day on Earth is out now on Ryko