Beck : "The Church of Scientology is a humanitarian organisation."!!!

His album features madcap dialogue, his stageshow features performing puppets - but Beck would like to be taken seriously.

Recently Beck got into the shipping forecast. "I remember coming into the studio one day and my producer was sitting there listening to it on his computer," he says. "I was like, 'What the hell is that?' He told me, 'It's the most relaxing thing in the world.' He said he loves to listens to it in the bath." Beck agreed - "the voices are just so pleasant" - and decided to recreate it on the finale to his new album, The Information, inviting an English friend into the studio to read out the coastal station reports for Tiree, Stornoway and Lerwick (showers at all three). "It kind of matched the mood of the song," he says.

The 36-year-old's ninth album is a welcome return to his mid-1990s form; it has that old spring in its step and twinkle in its eye, with Beck laying his absurdist rhymes over hip-hop beats and silly samples (you can hear his dog panting at one point). There's also a long conversation between Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze running in the background.

"We brought them in, and we were going to have a commentary going through the whole album, almost like the two old men in The Muppets. It was hilarious. A heavy beat would kick in and they would go, 'Shit ! Listen to that beat ! That drummer is so confident !' But we couldn't fit it all in. I asked them, 'What would the ultimate record that ever could possibly be made sound like ?' That's what they're going on about. They're saying it would be like an illuminated manuscript, handmade by monks. Or it would be a record that changed every time you listened to it. It was a great conversation."

Packaged with the album is a DVD of homemade videos for each song, featuring Beck and friends messing about in fancy dress (Devendra Banhart pops up, as does Beck's wife, the actor Marissa Ribisi, with whom he has a two-year-old son). The daft, Dali-esque clips ensure that even the album's introspective songs can't be accused of taking themselves too seriously.

At recent live shows, Beck has been joined onstage by marionettes, each of them dressed like a member of the band, each of them spending the entire show copying their human counterparts. The gap before the band's encore features a film of the puppets, made that day at whatever location they happen to be performing in. In Edinburgh, they bought little kilts and recreated Braveheart; at V Festival in Chelmsford, they visited the Portaloos; and in Staffordshire they trashed the dressing room of V headliners Radiohead. "Yeah, we apologised to Radiohead for that," says Beck. "But, y'know - what can we do? They're puppets."

For years he wanted robots on stage, but it was prohibitively expensive, so he settled on a puppet show instead. The four puppeteers he now takes on tour are serious professionals, and have worked on films such as Team America. "They're great. Sometimes I look back at them during a show and the puppets will be doing something completely ridiculous, like beating the shit out of each other or doing these slow-motion Matrix moves."

Beck is a funny mix of the very silly and the very serious - a philosopher-poet who likes dressing up and slapstick. But even on The Information's home videos he never strays for long from his persona as the deadpan hipster. "I am quite straight, yeah," he agrees. "There has been a lot of humour in my music, but I think maybe there's a mistrust of that in musicians. I guess you're always in danger of being dismissed as a clown."

He has combined these two aspects of himself, the straight man and the clown, throughout his musical career, consistently changing and developing. In the 12 years since he burst onto the scene with his slacker anthem Loser, he's shifted effortlessly from lo-fi rapper to lounge lizard, and then from "the new Prince" of Midnite Vultures to dusty folk troubadour.

"I've just followed wherever the sounds take me," says Beck. Right at the start of his career, he brokered a deal whereby he could release noisy, experimental records on an independent label , Bong Load (1994's abstract Stereopathic Soulmanure) and more commercial work on a major label, Geffen. The arrangement soon came to an end when, to Beck's annoyance, Geffen decided to release one of his indie efforts themselves (1998's Mutations). But if his indie days are behind him, he has continued to avoid making obvious choices - probably at the expense of greater mainstream success.

"I think if you're going to be one of the artists that rides the top the whole time, you can't afford to take chances and experiment the way I have," he shrugs. "But that's what I do. It's the choice I made. If I was in this to achieve some sort of mass acceptance, or for the money, I'd proceed from a totally different place." He sees himself as an outsider, and for years worked on the assumption that his career could collapse at any moment. "So I just had a laugh with it, y'know. I didn't take it seriously for a long, long time." This might explain his lyrics. You might be able to hum Beck hits such as Devil's Haircut or The New Pollution, but I'd hazard a guess you haven't the foggiest what they're about. A journalist once asked Beck the meaning of a couple of lines from Loser: "My time is a piece of wax falling on a termite/That's choking on the splinters." "I don't know," came the considered reply.

Around the turn of the millennium, when Beck hit 30, he had a rethink about the temporary nature of his career. "I sort of realised that I would still be making records and that people are actually listening," he says. "So I decided I'd like to say something." He made Sea Change, an album that painfully detailed his break-up with long-term partner Leigh Limon; musically, its downbeat folk-rock lacked Beck's usual sparkle.

What makes this new album so rewarding is its successful marriage of his quirky, beats-driven side with his more direct, emotional writing. One minute he's spitting classic Beck nonsense verse, the next he's singing sweet love songs or worrying about the state of the world. One track, Dark Star, seems to criticise American foreign policy, however obliquely - "A widow's tears washing a soldier's bones/Sterilised egos, delirium sequels/Punctured by the arrows of American eagles". Beck won't be drawn on his politics, however. "The whole mood of the country is in some of the songs," is all he'll say.

He will admit to being a Scientologist, although in the past he has been reluctant to talk about it. Today, he insists he's always happy to discuss it. "I think journalists are more uncomfortable [with it]," he says, "but I'm fine." While he doesn't come across as particularly knowledgeable or passionate on the subject, he explains that Scientology is "something that you can draw on. It's helpful." I ask him why Scientology is surrounded by so much mystery. "I think that's in the media," he says. "It's very open and the actuality of it is quite different." So it's a positive thing? "Oh yeah, absolutely. Doors are open. People go and have lunch."

"When we had 9/11, besides the police and the firefighters, they were the ones allowed in there, 'cos they effectively could help," he says.