The conversation begins in Loftus Road - Michael Nyman is a fan of Queens Park Rangers and one of the few composers, living or dead, whose oeuvre contains no fewer than three football-related works. The talk is of Don Givens and Terry Mancini, but before he gets into full flight on Stan Bowles, I nutmeg the man and get him back to the music itself.
Nyman, best known for the soundtrack to the movie, The Piano, is now one of the most successful figures in "contemporary classical" music. But with film work comprising only part of what he does, he is also one of the hardest-working musicians around - he has written chamber opera, music for string quartet, short blasts for adverts and continues to tour with his amplified ensemble called simply The Michael Nyman Band.
It was, however, the soundtrack work which first brought Nyman to prominence. His partnership with Peter Greenaway led to music for films such as Prospero's Books, The Draughtsman's Contract and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Other film work includes Gattaca, Carrington, Brimstone and Treacle and his latest Wonderland. The effect on Nyman's career as a musician is that his music sells, he makes money and now he's a bit of a pop star, whether he likes it or not.
Born in London in 1944, Nyman studied at the Royal Academy of Music and at King's College. Teachers such as Alan Bush and Thurston Dart had an enormous impact on him and today Nyman can trace certain actual moments of lasting influence - such as the occasion when Dart presented him with a collection of the keyboard works of the 17th-century composer, John Bull. Bull was interested in "developmental repetition" - and became a major influence on Nyman who by 1968 was playing with Steve Reich, The Flying Lizards and the Portsmouth Sinfonia.
While he had never quite fitted in with prominent ethos of 1960s "serious" music and where it inevitably led, he nevertheless persevered with his academic studies. "I was always academically inclined," he says. "I was very curious to see how things were made, how a piece of music was structured, how the orchestra did things and how the orchestration had a particular effect. And this has stayed with me all my life, although I don't listen to music quite so analytically any more.
"But my process in composing, I suppose, bears some relation to it - there's some kind of reverse analytical process. It's very difficult to eradicate those kind of listening habits."
But, even as an analytical child, Nyman recognised that there was more to music than mathematics and a technical structure which could be examined with a cold eye. He knew, as he puts it, that "you could take the butterfly apart, but that you didn't know why it was so beautiful." Making music was not a precise intellectual process.
"It struck me that there are some magic moments in music. Yes, you can actually see how they have come about, but you cannot explain why they move you. And that "magic moments" approach has stayed with me - I look for a way of freezing those magic moments and re-articulating them into a different kind of form, structure and narrative from where I found them in the first place."
Nyman is quite happy to acknowledge that there are many things to be found in all the musics which have gone before. John Bull's take on the song "Walsingham" re-emerged in his String Quartet No 1, the Romanian folk music he collected in the mid-1960s resurfaced in his third string quartet and his music for the film Carrington, and there was more than one 19th-century Scottish song in evidence in The Piano.
Nyman is entirely comfortable with this approach and counters his critics by reminding them that everyone from Beethoven to Mozart did exactly the same thing. Another important, but not often acknowledged, reality is that "folk" music was the "pop" music of the day - and Nyman, like Mozart, is more than happy to make music that is popular.
There's no doubts he succeeds. In fact, much of Michael Nyman's music has all the appeal of true pop. It can be appreciated instantaneously, the listener wants to immediately possess or repeat it - and it sells to a large audience. There are, of course, many in Nyman's orbit who are immediately suspicious of all of this. They prefer music, as he puts it, to be "something you have to kind of burst your brain on" and which preferably cannot be listened to with any feelings of pleasure. It's an attitude which Nyman meets regularly, and he more popular he gets, the more pot-shots they take.
"There are a lot of snotty-nosed critics who resent a given number of punters enjoying a piece of new music. And not even with the most popular things I've written, have I actually sat down and thought about how I could grab a large audience. The reality is that the message you get from the music, and what it does for you, comes precisely from me doing things that I want to do and make me happy. My music is new music - even when it uses a piece of Mozart. And it's not rock'n'roll. But because it's popular and it sells and it makes money, we are somehow selling out and contriving music to grab an audience - and that's just bollocks. The logic of so-called serious music is that it's part of an elite. We're not supposed to do anything which can possibly be of interest beyond the privileged few.
"But, on the other hand, if those same people accidentally wrote a piece of music which a large enough amount of people liked and their royalties went up, they'd be only too pleased."
Nyman's most recent soundtracks are for Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland and Neil Jordan's The End of The Affair. The Wonderland soundtrack is as instantly accessible as anything he has composed to date and, again, criticism/begrudgery will inevitably follow. But Nyman is well aware that writing specifically for film brings with it certain obligation - and the first is to the film itself. Nyman's job is, after all, to serve the film and the director rather than do whatever he (or the waiting snipers) might want.
The main difficulty for Nyman is making sure he doesn't wind up composing for a turkey. Film scripts can be misleading items and so, in choosing a project, Nyman will often wait to see the first cut before deciding to proceed. There are, however, cases where he doesn't have to think for too long - the opportunities to work with Jane Campion and Neil Jordan among those he says he didn't have to "scratch his head about." The more successful he has become, the more choice he has - and he is glad of that. He is, after all, a professional, working musician.
"You know this idea of how the artist is supposed to be autonomous and should decide for him or herself what goes where. This is conveniently forgetting that for centuries composers have worked to commission to satisfy patrons - in the case of Mozart, to do a whole diversity of work from simple cheap dances to operas. There's a whole bunch of arguments used to condemn what we do but I'd rather be me doing what I'm doing than be working in a university faculty where the university is your patron. That's where the university gives the composer time to write a piece of music which perhaps no-one wants to hear and, anyway, there's no necessity for anyone to hear it because there's a financial cushion. That's not the same as being on the cutting edge of having to make a living."
The Michael Nyman Band plays the Olympia Theatre Dublin on September 12th