For me, the essence of being a one-man band is to have a one-man band frame of mind. It's about pursuing your own ideas with determination, dexterity and a certain amount of masochism, and developing an obsession about taking your project as far as it can go. This combination of pragmatic necessity and purity of vision means that to achieve your ambitions, you might have to undertake them alone. Especially when no funds are forthcoming from elsewhere...

You don't have to be a musician to be a one-man band: the term describes myself as filmmaker on this project. Like most of the musicians in One Man in the Band, I didn't set out with the intention of becoming a one-man band. For my first feature film, I wanted to make a film about how a person's identity can be constructed through music and performance, but couldn't figure out how to fund the multi-camera shoots. It occurred to me that if I filmed one-man bands I would only need one cameraman – myself. My friend Martin Andrews introduced me to the inimitable Man From Uranus, and the ball was rolling.

It became clear that working as a one-man band filmmaker was the only way to make this film. Filming the musicians became relaxed and intimate – I cannot imagine getting the warmly humanistic interviews in the film if they had been shot with a full camera crew glowering at a quivering one-man band. The one-man band filmmaker approach works in other ways, too: the camera's gaze becomes more intense, almost child-like. Plus, because no-one else was involved in the filmmaking process, the whole film has an atmosphere of indefinable oddness... rather like the music.