In November Christendom's most radical alternative rocker STEVE TAYLOR will be commencing a British tour with Guardian. In anticipation of this event, a video 'Squint: Movies From The Sound Track', directed by as well as starring Steve Taylor, has just been released. The making of the video was no ordinary pop promo story. Steve took the budget offered by Warner Bros for the video and instead of settling for a standard Hollywood shoot, spent the cash on equipment and air tickets. Then, with a small film crew, Steve set off for Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, India and Turkey. The footage he came back with makes for (to quote the publicity blurb) "one of the most ambitious film shoots ever undertaken by a rock artist." During his sojourn around the world, Steve kept a diary. These are extracts from it.

The towns people are equal parts cooperative and curious and seem especially amused by my height (6-foot-3), which is not surprising considering the average height here is seemingly about half that. (Yesterday, I had a Vietnamese man sneak up behind me and feel one of my knees in order to convince his friends that I wasn't on stilts. Maybe someone told him this is how Americans like to be greeted...)

Hoi An is so picturesque that my mind has been full of nothing but the next shot and my right eye is always looking through the eyepiece of my fancy little director's viewfinder (trust me - if you could see me wearing it around my neck, you'd be very impressed).

In fact, I'm so into what we're filming that I almost miss a real moment: We're on a short break and Russ and I are sitting just outside the courtyard of a small house, joking around with some of the local kids. A woman in her late 30s, evidently the mother of one of the young boys hanging around, comes out of the house carrying something to show us. It is a small, well-worn Bible. She points to it, then points to the sky and says something like "Christo". We pause for a moment, as both of us have been taken by surprise. Then, almost in unison, we both point to our hearts and repeat the word, "Christo". The woman smiles.

It is Sunday. We may have missed church, but we have had communion.

BANGKOK, THAILAND MONDAY, AUGUST 2ND
Let's start with the plane rides. Yesterday, lunch was served on Vietnam Airlines and it appeared to be some sort of poultry loaf with two slices of white bread. I'm halfway through whatever it is I'm eating when Russ points out a bug in his loaf. Then he finds another one. Then he takes a look at what's left of my sandwich and points out a medium-sized bug head, starkly contrasted against the white of my bread. As I stare blankly at what's left of my name-that-meat sandwich, my mind drifts off to a certain beagle...

Our mission tonight is very specific: I want to film a sequence for "Bannerman" at the Famed Flying Chicken Restaurant of Bangkok. This open-air eatery is notable primarily for the manner in which its chickens are served. A chef stands on a platform in the centre of the restaurant, places a whole chicken in a catapult, sets the chicken on fire, releases the catapult and the flaming chicken flies through the air just as a waiter on a unicycle pedals up a ramp to centre stage and catches said chicken on a platter, where he then spins around and delivers it to your table. (I am not making this up.)

Sadly, it's raining and we're informed by restaurant management, that the wet surfaces make it too dangerous for waiters on unicycles. Disappointed but still hungry, we journey down the street to Bangkok's largest restaurant - the waiters here are merely on roller skates. As we're finishing a very fine meal with our very swell hosts from Youth With A Mission, I get an idea. The three-piece house band has been performing highly suspect versions of American standards from "Misty" to "Feelings" and I decide they're perfect for a filmed lip-sync performance of "Bannerman". Since the restaurant is approaching closing time, I ask the band through our interpreter if they'd be game. They seem eager and the pay is good, so we play the track a few times for them to get familiar enough with the song to fake it really badly.

My plan is to perform with the sheet music on a stand in front of me, and to sing the song using the same microphone technique I learned as a youngster watching a certain TV show about a family pop band which travels around in a painted school bus (ie, look stiff, act cheerful and never vary the distance from the mike to the mouth). The problem is that about a hundred young restaurant employees have somehow heard that an American rock singer is filming an MTV video and they're crowding around the stage to watch.

As the song is run a few times for the band, they seem to really be getting into it. Unfortunately, once I start lip-syncing for the cameras, the audience's energy is immediately sucked out of the room and all one hundred disappointed employees quietly slink away, no doubt thinking to themselves, "I could perform better than the Yankee."

KATHMANDU, NEPAL WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 4TH
It doesn't get much more exotic than Kathmandu. How exotic? When we entered Nepalese airspace, we were told by the pilot to set our clocks ahead one hour and 15 minutes. Why? I don't know, but I suspect it's somehow connected with the free-range cows that roam the city at will.

Everywhere we look in Kathmandu, there are eyes watching us. We're here in the Monkey Temple on a hill above the city and Mark has just confided to me that this place gives him the creeps. Massive eyes have been painted onto the sides of the temple and they follow us like the Mona Lisa's. Nasty littly monkeys stare at us, waiting to pounce on any food we might toss their direction - one of them actually sneaked up on our guide and stole a bag of cookies out of his hand. Dogs lurk in corners and fight the monkeys for breadcrumbs - apparently no one told them the monkeys themselves would be more nutritional. Many of the children have their eyes painted to resemble the eyes on the temple and they stare at us like we were foreigners or something.

NEW DELHI, INDIA SATURDAY, AUGUST 7TH
We've just been informed that we'll be stranded at New Delhi International Airport for the next 20 hours or so.
On first glance, this place looks like a suburban galleria - lots of shops, a few eateries, benches, piped-in music, sunshine streaming through the skylights. Now, after only a few hours, it still seems like a suburban galleria - the kind with rats running around, bathrooms where they charge you in a foreign currency you don't own for each time you need to relieve yourself, non-stop Indian Muzak that's enough to make me wish I was back at the dentist's office and a senile, flea-bitten house cat with great patches of fur missing who prowls the terminal at will, spreading parasites and bad vibes everywhere with no regard to race, creed, colour or the number of times you whisper, "Go away, kitty!"

If this were Vietnam, he wouldn't act so cocky. . .

PAMUKKALE, TURKEY WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 11TH
When I was a kid, I didn't realise I had lousy vision. I was always squinting to try and see things more clearly. Now I'm on the trip of a lifetime and even though I've got a contact lens on each eyeball, I keep catching myself squinting, trying to see everything from a different perspective, trying to get a better depth of field, trying to imagine how it's going to look on film when we get home.