I honestly felt closer to death than I did to life

I honestly felt closer to death than I did to life.”With all his money feeding his habit, Frusciante soon lost his possessions and home. As his teeth rotted and infection spread throughout his body, many assumed the end was near. Yet he managed to remain in this grim, stupefied state for three years before cleaning up. Three years later, in 1998, a rehabilitated Frusciante was asked back into the band.”For the first time in my life I felt very clear about who I was,” he recalls.

“Even though I was on a good path artistically when I was 21, I still felt I was doing it by the skin of my teeth, like I was barely getting away with it But after coming off drugs I was very confident. I hadn’t played guitar much in a few years and with the little bit of technique I had left, I felt very good about what I was doing.”Now, Frusciante eats healthily, practises yoga and has a shiny new set of teeth. He also works on music constantly; he can’t remember the last time he spent a day doing anything else. “I’m really proud of the music I’ve been making in recent years That’s not for any vainglorious reasons. It’s just that it’s taken a lot of pain and confusion and suffering, not just for me but for the people around me, to get to this point. I know it sounds clich? but it’s the music more than anything that’s made me better.”Less dark than its three predecessors, Shadows Collide with People is Frusciante’s most melodic and accessible solo effort yet. Tracks such as “Wednesday’s Song” and “Song to Sing When I’m Lonely” could sit on any Chili Peppers album.

The songs, he says, were written during the band’s 2003 tour. After being away for three or four weeks at a time, he would come home and go straight into the recording studio. “It’s a strange way to make a record, but that’s the only way to do it,” he says. “People are always surprised that I find the time to do all this other work besides playing with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but to me it seems inconceivable that I could do the Chili Peppers and nothing else.”Frusciante was born in New York in 1970. His mother was a Juilliard-trained pianist and singer who put her career on hold in order to look after the family. Now she sings for her church and provided backing vocals for the Chili Peppers’ hit “Under the Bridge.”When, with a rather sinister grin, Frusciante tells me that, when he was four, the voices in his head told him he was going to be a guitarist He’s deadly serious. “The voices had been explaining all these things to me, and by the time I was seven I was seeing these photographs of Jimi Hendrix and Ace Frehley in magazines Then it all came together I realised I was supposed to be in a rock band.

At the age of 11, I finally picked up the guitar and wrote 25 punk songs in a row.”When his parents separated, Frusciante and his mother moved to Santa Monica. There, he worked studiously at his guitar-playing, copying the chords of his favourite art-rockers – Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson and Frank Zappa. When he was 17 he went to an audition for Zappa’s band, but once there he decided he wouldn’t bother playing. “I knew how to play every one of his songs, but I saw the way he was with other people and thought, “I don’t like the look of this’. So I just walked out.”It was Frusciante’s friend DH Peligro from the Dead Kennedys who introduced him to the Chili Peppers’ bass player Flea; the three of them would jam together at Flea’s house in LA.