Chris Cunningham goes centre stage

Chris Cunningham is almost 40 but he looks uncannily like a teenager. He is tall and stick-thin, with the unhealthy pallor of a bedroom recluse. In the squat-like sitting room of his Georgian house in north London, the curtains remain closed against the midday glare. "There's something about the light that comes into this room," he says, hesitantly, "It's just too bright."

So we sit in semi-darkness and talk about, among other things the other-worldly brilliance of Bartók, Blade Runner, Debussy, Vangelis, Varèse, William Gibson, Pavement, early Depeche Mode, mid-period Pink Floyd and, of course, Kraftwerk.

Chris Cunningham is a very contemporary kind of pop artist, an almost invisible presence whose influence on the mainstream is virally pervasive. The frenetic, wildly inventive videos he made for Aphex Twin ("Windowlicker", "Come to Daddy") and Björk ("All Is Full of Love") redefined the form and have been plundered relentlessly by less gifted directors. For the latter, he made Björk into a robot.

His very disturbing short film, Rubber Johnny, made in 2005, again using an Aphex Twin soundtrack, features "a hyperactive, shape-shifting mutant child". It remains an all-time YouTube favourite, which perversely brings him close to despair.

"When YouTube first appeared, I just thought, 'What is the point now? Why spend three years on a short film for it to end up being shown out-of-sync on a shitty format?'"

Cunningham remains a relentlessly experimental film-maker with a slightly deranged imaginative streak shaped by the sci-fi films and electronic music he devoured in his youth. He has the air of a contented outsider, someone who is obsessive about what he does but unbothered about its commercial impact. Which is not to say he does not make big money. The uninitiated may know him best for the recent TV ad he made for Gucci Flora perfume in which a beautiful girl waves her arms to his ambient remix of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" sending shock waves though a field of white flowers. Now Cunningham is tired of videos and adverts. "Making commercials," he says, "is the dustbin of film-making. It sucks you dry."

This week, he will perform three ambitious live shows, in Brighton, Manchester and London, unveiling a new 75-minute audio-visual work. "It's a work in progress really. It's three giant screens, lasers and a soundtrack that will be like a big mixtape. It's the closest I can get to what I want to do: the visceral sound of a live show but with massive screens like a cinema."

Cunningham has only recently started making his own "visually driven" music. Thus far, it has tended to be radical reinterpretations of others' work. It has, he admits, been a difficult leap, not least because he is no longer tied to Warp, the Nottingham-based organisation which put out Aphex Twin's music and Shane Meadows's films. "It's expensive without a record label behind you, but I don't fit into the traditional model where you make a single and then a video to go with it. What I do is more experimental and the visuals usually come first. That's why the live performance is exciting. It's not film, it's not a gig, it's not an installation, but it has elements of all three."

Recently, he has also tried his hand at producing, working on the Horrors' latest album. He is working on a mysterious long-term project with the group's singer, Faris Badwin.

Cunningham's live shows will also feature a remix of "New York Is Killing Me", one of the songs he worked on for Gil Scott-Heron's album, I'm New Here. Its gestation gives you some insight into the singular workings of his brain. "I've been living next to the railway line for 12 years and I've become obsessed with the harmonics of the trains on the lines," he says. "For years, I've been going down to the tracks at night to record the trains. It's just about finding sounds, really, and then trying to replicate them on synths or else just trying to integrate them into a soundscape so you get that atmosphere. We've also been filming loads on the New York subway and the whole thing is finally starting to come together: the visuals, the new music, the words. It's taken months, though."

This, in itself, is a breakthrough. Cunningham once worked for four years on a short film that he then abandoned without showing anyone. He spent three years discussing a film version of William Gibson's cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, before deciding he could not make it his own. "You can become so obsessive that you become almost inactive," he says, "but you could spend years on a film and then not have the final say."

He started out working on the film of Judge Dredd, before being headhunted by Stanley Kubrick to design the animatronic robot that featured in AI, which the director never completed. He learned how to make short films "by watching commercials with the sound down for a year until I figured out how they were put together".

He becomes animated when talking about the films he loved as a child – Alien, Blade Runner, The Elephant Man – and says: "I was obsessed to the point where I could have told you who worked as the gaffer on those films."

He was even more obsessed with electronic music, which, he says, is all down to his dad playing him Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Tomita's Snowflakes Are Dancing when he was seven. "Those records blew my mind. They were incredible soundscapes. I immediately connected with the tones and the textures and the fact that you were entering a parallel world when you listened to them."

On the wall, a grid of record sleeves maps out his voyage of discovery. They include Speak & Spell by Depeche Mode, Computer World by Kraftwerk, DAF's first album, a musique concrète compilation, and Led Zeppelin II: "'The Lemon Song' blows me away." These days, his tastes run more to Bartók, Ligeti, Varèse and Debussy.

Before he leaves to meet Grace Jones, he tells me about the remix he is doing for her. "She's up for anything, so I brought in a trombone player to make the most evil-sounding, deep, low bass sounds. I was trying to get those low horns that Varèse gets. Varèse is more evil-sounding than the darkest dubstep bass." I'm willing to bet that Chris Cunningham's horns are more evil-sounding still.