David Shrigley may not yet be a household name, but his art - crudely drawn characters who inhabit a weird and occasionally violent world of strange creatures, surreal shopping lists and spelling mistakes - would probably be instantly recognisable to most. There are numerous books, He makes album covers for bands he loves and even has a permanent installation in the Science Museum. His cartoons appear in the Guardian every week, and there are t-shirts and postcards and shopping bags adorned with his work. In the dying months of 2007, he even released an album, Worried Noodles. Originally, Worried Noodles was a conceptual piece, an album without music, just the lyrics and the cover and the dust sleeve. But now, the music to that album has been recorded by a whole host of bands, who have turned his imaginary songs into real ones. Its transformation into and release as a real record is the reason for this interview, which, in typical Shrigley fashion, begins in a slightly surreal manner.
“Hello,” says a voice somewhere in Glasgow.
“Hi. Is that David?”
“Yes. Hi. Sorry, I was on the phone, so you may have got a busy signal for a while. How are you?”
“Good. Yourself?”
“It’s actually my birthday today so I’m feeling in a good mood. I keep looking out the window for the postman to come. But I think all my cards arrived on Friday. That’s the problem with having a birthday on a Monday. People don’t know when to post stuff.”

It’s a small but brief glimpse into the normal day to day life of the mind behind the bizarre world of Shrigley’s art. He’s just returned from Sweden, having overseen one of his largest exhibitions to date and he talks at length and at ease about everything on his mind. His replies are careful and considered, his words thoughtful and deliberate. Yet there’s still a hint of the characters and irreverent humour that permeate his work in his dry, deadpan tone – you can almost see the cartoons running around inside his head, mischievous but simultaneously straight-faced.
“It’s nice to be back, actually,” he says. “And it’s much easier to do phone interviews than email interviews when I was there. You always feel duty bound to be much more articulate in an email interview, to go back over it and correct your syntax and your grammar. But you don’t have to do that on the phone. You just trust that the other person won’t make you seem like an inarticulate fool.” He needn’t worry. His drawings are clearly not an accurate reflection of his mind or intelligence, and as he discusses his distinctive, disturbing style, the disparity between what he is describing and how he is describing it couldn’t be more noticeable.
“I’ve always drawn in that way,” he says, “since I was a little kid. And I’ve been very conscious to draw in that way, because it’s a process of reduction, whereby even though I went to art school and learned how to draw I figured that I’ve got a lot of things to say, a lot of ideas, and I wanted to say them as quickly and directly as possible. So my graphic style is shorthand really. Rather than taking care over making images and making them good examples of objective drawing, rendering three-dimensional space, etcetera etcetera, I just kind of eliminated all those more complicated aspects of drawing in favour of doing something that’s very direct, as direct as possible.”

The new version of Worried Noodles is the latest addition to his canon, another arm on the octopus –probably a crudely rendered octopus with sharp teeth and an appetite for human flesh – of his artistic output. It’s testament to the power and strength of his work that so many bands were up for contributing to the project. Franz Ferdiand, Grizzly Bear, David Byrne, Psapp, Deerhoof, Aidan Moffat, Hot Chip, Scout Niblett and Casiotone For The Painfully Alone are just some of the 39 bands who eagerly leapt at the chance to Shrigley’s “little text poem things”, as he terms them, into proper songs.
“They were all surprising,” he says about hearing them for the first time. “It was always really weird because I’d written the lyrics. They just appeared in my email inbox as an MP3 every week or so for about nine months. It was really enjoyable. It was a really bizarre and wonderful experience to open this MP3 attachment and there’s David Byrne singing one of your songs. It’s really strange.”
Interestingly, Hot Chip and Franz Ferdinand both chose to recorded very different versions of the same song. Does one sound more like his art than the other?
“I don’t know, to be honest. They both sound like my art and they both don’t sound like it, if you know what I mean. It’s impossible to say. There is a voice, I suppose, in my work, whereby, I made a film a couple of years ago which had a voice, had a narrator, and people said, ‘Oh, I’m not sure about the voice, we thought it would be different.’ And I suppose that’s such a subjective thing, you know, it’s like which voice is my voice? I don’t know. I really don’t know. So in one sense you could perhaps say there would be a voice that would be my voice, but I’ve never really thought about there ever being any music that would be my music or the music to accompany it. Which I suppose leads to another question – which voice is most like mine? I don’t really know the answer to that question either.”