There is a very small mention of Prince in this article from the Guardian newspaper in Britain.

I have always liked Todd and Hot Chip for that matter but wasnt aware of the 'fact' quoted in this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk...ddrundgren

'That's one potent hot toddyHot Chip gave Todd Rundgren his first hit in 35 years. Rundgren talks to the band's Alexis

Todd Rundgren has been many things in his 60 years. He was a hero to the young Prince, who would try to get backstage to meet the gangly whizzkid multi-instrumentalist with the long, rainbow-coloured hair; he was also a hero to Mark Chapman, who was wearing a Rundgren promo T-shirt when he was arrested for John Lennon's murder. He has variously been a psychedelic Anglophile with Nazz in the late 60s, a do-it-yourself pop craftsman, a purveyor of extreme electronic noise, a frontman for the cosmic-prog outfit Utopia, a producer of Patti Smith and Meat Loaf, and a pioneer of digital media.

This year he managed another first, when he became the artist with the longest gap between chart hits: 35 years. In February, he finally followed up I Saw the Light, a freak chart entry in June 1973, with an appearance, as a sampled voice, on Hot Chip's album Made in the Dark. That's him in the middle of Shake a Fist, drawling: "Before we go any further, I'd like to show you all a game I made up. This game is called Sounds of the Studio, and it can be played with any record, including this one - you may be surprised."

And it is Hot Chip who provide the perfect conversational foil for Rundgren in a telephone summit meeting between two generations of electronic pop musicians when their lead singer, Alexis Taylor, joins the Guardian and Rundgren for a three-way interview. Not that the Chip want to be perceived as electronica - Taylor wants to make that clear from the start, because so often "electronic" is synonymous with cold calculation.

"Most of our interviews are spent talking about other musicians rather than about what our music feels like to listen to, and often we're grouped in with electronic artists," he says. "People assume we must be listening to French house, to Daft Punk and things that I have pretty much zero interest in. 'Soul' or 'pop': those are my favourite words to describe the music that I like. And I tend to listen to people who are much older than me, who came before me, rather than my contemporaries."

Taylor is a lifelong Rundgren fan. "Well, not since birth," he corrects, "but since I was about 17." The first Rundgren LP he heard was Something/Anything?, a double album from 1972 that Rundgren wrote and produced, and on which he played all the instruments. His next purchase was A Wizard, a True Star, Rundgren's "stream of consciousness" album, recorded under the influence of psychedelic drugs. But his favourite remains Rundgren's debut album, 1971's Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren, a set of guitar rock-outs and lush piano ballads made with the musicians who would later form David Bowie's Tin Machine. Rundgren was high when he made that one, too.

"By the time I got to Ballad, I'd started smoking pot," says Rundgren by phone from his home on Kauai, Hawaii. "It suddenly organised everything in my head. The Ballad album is my first coherent songwriting record, and I attribute that to the fact that I got certain insights about the process by getting high."

In America, Rundgren is enough of a pop culture figure that the album title Runt could be used as the punch-line of a joke on the sitcom 30 Rock. Over here, notwithstanding that 1973 surprise chart entry, he is known for producing Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell, and is usually seen as a marginal, eccentric, reclusive genius, a sort of Brian Eno/Brian Wilson hybrid. He acknowledges the impact of drugs on his career.

"A lot of my records parallel my drug exploration," he says. He was 21 when a friend introduced him to marijuana. After that came Ritalin, a stimulant used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, drowsiness and chronic fatigue. That might explain why Something/Anything? found Rundgren zipping manically between styles, from Motown pastiches to heavy metal, mad sound collages and Broadway showtunes. It also saw him working around the clock. "Ritalin was what turned Something/Anything? into a double album," he says. "I was doing sessions during the day, then I'd do sessions at night in my house. Before I knew it I'd gone over the reasonable boundaries for a single album."

It works both ways: Shake a Fist came about as a result of Hot Chip's other singer, Joe Goddard, taking salvia divinorum, a powerful but legal psychoactive herb, at Glastonbury. Taylor's lyrics - "I move underwater, I eat what I slaughter" - were his attempt to imagine what it would be like to take the drug himself. "I don't take any drugs myself, not as a rule," says Taylor, "but it's interesting to hear Todd talking about his different experiences and the different drugs he took per record. And it's interesting that the song that we sampled Todd on is the product of Joe describing this particular drug to me."

Rundgren says he is "against the dilettante consumption of drugs" and has "avoided some of the pitfalls of self-medication", stopping him from becoming a drugs casualty. "I've never had an OD of any kind, and I've never had to be taken to a hospital because of something that I consumed. I've had the occasional scary trip but nothing that left me emotionally scarred." He admits he used himself as a sort of human laboratory, especially in the 70s, when he was at his most prolific and experimental, but, "I was never a social drug taker. Most people do them to get high, but all of my drug experimentation has been the result of me feeling like I have got stuck down a creative cul-du-sac."

Taylor is intrigued by the idea of using drugs to get inside one's head, and by the notion of controlled exploration of the senses for artistic ends. "Well, I'm interested in it," he laughs, "but not enough to do it. I leave that to the rest of my band. No, it stays hypothetical for me. I'm not really sure why that is, because I've actually spent a lot of time around people who have tried drugs. But I don't see it happening with me, sorry."

Rundgren apologises, too - for not knowing as much about Hot Chip as they do about him. "I don't for a minute expect that you would, you know, be aware of our band, really," Taylor hesitates, sweetly. Not that the effort hasn't been made. "I went on the internet yesterday and poked around, but I can't say I'm an expert," says Rundgren. He's got a good excuse, though. "I've been out of the musical loop because I'm working on a new record, which leaves me in a state of ignorance about almost everything else."

As reliably unreliable as ever, and just when a new generation of electronic musicians has started championing his work, Rundgren has decided to make an arena rock album, called Arena. "It's something between prog rock and pop music," he says. "It's got very hooky songs, with big, singalong choruses and melodic guitar solos - essentially, the kind of music that works well in an arena. I figure it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy: if I make a successful arena rock record, I'll wind up playing arenas."

Having spent the past two decades on the fringes, attempting a Prince-style reinvention as TR-i (Todd Rundgren Interactive), dabbling with CD-rom and computer technology while releasing occasional albums such as 1997's bossa nova exercise With a Twist, Rundgren hasn't filled an arena since his days with Utopia, when concept albums such as Ra were transformed into spectaculars with extravagant sets and pyrotechnics worthy of Spinal Tap. At the height of punk, Rundgren, who penned the psychedelic anthem Open My Eyes for Nazz while still in his teens, was cavorting on stage in Egyptian robes, surrounded by fire-breathing dragons. "If I decide to work in a genre, it might be something that isn't necessarily popular at the time," he deadpans. "Often it has no contemporary relevance."

Does Taylor take heart from Rundgren's body of work and his obduracy, from his eclectic experimentation and refusal to bow to commercial demands for 40 years (Nazz's debut album was recorded in 1968)?

"I really do," he replies. "I wish our band would be braver in terms of moving stylistically from one thing to the next, from album to album, totally going against what's expected and eradicating what we were known for on the previous record. That's something I'm very interested in." He'd like to be more Todd-like? "No, no, no," he says, warily. "You don't want to be Todd-like or anyone-like. You want to be more unlike anything. That's more appealing to me. I love your music, Todd, but what I take from it is the way you've been able to leap around and not follow any rulebook."

This isn't their only disagreement during the two-hour interview. They argue, politely, about what constitutes "soul" - Taylor considers Justin Timberlake's Cry Me a River one of the best singles of the last five years, while Rundgren dismisses Timberlake's vocal performance as the studio-tweaked squeaks of a grown man trying to sound "like an 11-year-old boy". And there is almost a transatlantic incident over, of all things, U2.

"There's only one band," says Rundgren, "that could ever even pretend to assume the mantle of what the Beatles did, who have been so pre-eminent and world-dominating that they could effect a paradigm shift in the culture, who have been willing to leverage their success into musical change, and that is U2 - regardless of what the result of that is." Taylor's not having it. "How did they change anything, really?" he asks, missing the point of Rundgren's last line - U2 may be powerful and influential, but they're not necessarily any good.

It's been a lively encounter between the grand master of brainiac synthesised pop and his eager if occasionally recalcitrant student. Rundgren has the final word on the dangerously thin line between inspiration and imitation. "The only Todd-like thing you would want to do is still be making music when you're 60," he says. "That, to me, is the most remarkable thing of all."

· Todd Rundgren's Arena is released on September 29. He will tour the UK in November. Hot Chip's single Hold On is released by EMI next month'