The record features the sound of Abbey Road - literally

Herbert's last release featured the sound of him ripping up Gap clothes and destroying McDonalds' burgers.

But the latest record Goodnight Swingtime features books, photocopiers, a print shop guillotine, and newspapers folded up and filled with rice in combination with Herbert's own jazz orchestra.

"It's quite hard to add sounds of something so very electronic and modern as a computer printer to a saxophone section of five great players, but it was something I was determined to do whether it succeeded or not," Herbert told BBC World Service's The Music Biz programme.

He said he had spent six months arranging the band, four days recording, and then another four months "chopping it up on computer".

"The sampler removed any boundaries between hierarchies of sound," Herbert added.

"Now a colour printer is of equal merit - sonically at least - to an opera singer."

Abbey Road sound

But persuading a band of well-known jazz musicians to "play" objects literally taken from the walls of the Abbey Road studios was not easy, Herbert admitted.

"We tricked them a little bit - we didn't tell them entirely what was going on to begin with," he said.

Herbert wanted people to question what he was printing in the record

"You can't go in there on the first day at Abbey Road and ask them to play a fire extinguisher on a chair.

"We saved that till the last day - by which point, hopefully, we'd sold them on the music side of things."

But he added that he himself had had no qualms about playing fire extinguishers in the same room as the Beatles recorded their legendary tracks.

"On the last day we took all the sounds that we could get from Abbey Road, because it struck me that the building was bigger than all of us," Herbert stated.

"The room has remained largely unchanged since the 60s, and it's such a phenomenal room and phenomenal place to record in.

"Elgar recorded there and opened Abbey Road originally. It has such a long English musical tradition, and in a way I wanted to capture literally the fabric of the building and incorporate it into the record."

Bush attacks

Herbert has no record company, and paid for both the band and the studio himself.

But he said such an arrangement gave him both commercial and artistic freedom.

"It is costly, but also from a business point of view it's actually a better proposition, because we make four or five times more money back from a single CD doing it ourselves than we could do through a record company," he stressed.

One of the less well-established musical instruments

"We'd have to sell four or five times the amount of records to generate the same amount of money."

Herbert added that being unsigned allowed him to say what he thinks - Goodbye Swingtime contains a number of blistering attacks on US president George Bush - in contrast to many of the leading artists of the day afraid of upsetting their sponsors.

"I think it's pretty depressing that if you at music over the last year, in 50 years' time there would be absolutely no indication that a war went on during that time, or any of the massive global events," Herbert said.