John Lurie’s rag-tag group of savants, embedded in the New York City wave of late-’70s and ‘80s art and music movements, connected the dots between innovative jazz and the city’s burgeoning punk scene. Although his first ever public musical performance was in London: a solo saxophone concert at Covent Garden’s defunct Acme Gallery. “I loved it there except for the weather and the food,” he says. “Punk was starting when I was living there and playing on the streets, and it was a little too much for me, actually. I was a pretty wild kid, but everyone spitting on each other and rocks being thrown? That was like, damn, that’s a bit much.”

Back in New York, Lurie lived with and mentored Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol would often be seen in the front row of The Lounge Lizards shows, and they had fans in David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. But he isn’t rose-tinted about the gravity of his drug-fuelled bohemian days. “It was like a warzone here at that time,” he recalls. “People were just falling out of windows – literally. I knew two people who fell out of windows. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

Although he’s humble about his acting talent, Lurie starred in early Jim Jarmusch films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, as well as Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, Marin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and David Lynch’s Wild At Heart. As a composer, he was nominated for a Grammy for Get Shorty.

The Lounge Lizards started out a little tongue-in-cheek before transforming into a profound musical project. “We were wiseguys, and there was a lot of humour to it, but we’d do some serious music,” says Lurie. “But the serious music-people could never quite see that, because we were punks to start, and some people never got over that as the band got more sophisticated and elegant. The jazz people in particular were like, ‘Well, no, they wear suits with tape holding them together.’”

Lurie’s TV series follow a similar trajectory. His cult classic ‘90s TV show Fishing with John was a spectrum of unpredictable, joyful and friendship-damaging adventures with Tom Waits, Jim Jarmusch, Willem Dafoe and Dennis Hopper. It was pastichey, with an earnest narrator laying the drama and subtly rude phrases on thick over seasick scenes. Decades on, although humour is key in its endearment, the three seasons of HBO’s Painting with John just don’t reference anything. The show is its own thing entirely: validating, confident, life-affirming and funny.

“I think humour is really important,” he says. “In terms of artists who have made a difference to society in the US over the past few years – Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin – comedians have had more of a good influence than almost anybody else. So it’s just part of it. One of the many things in my arsenal is humour.”

Living on a paradisiacal Caribbean island, Lurie may be a little further removed from society’s social, political and climate issues than many, but by this point, he thought that human beings would be doing better. “Kindness too,” he adds. “You’d think that empathy and compassion would be part of evolution. Humans have more empathy and compassion than animals that prey on each other. We attack our own species – that’s bizarre.”

“You meet great people all the time,” he says, “but if you look at who the world leaders are… What the fuck? In the United States, look at who our choices are going to be for president. I mean, you couldn’t walk into a bar and find two worse people.”

“The outrageous suffering that’s going on in so many places in the world. We see more of what’s going on, because of technology and the internet… Maybe it’s always been like this, but it’s just heartbreaking.”

Lurie’s intention in creating Painting with John was to cheer people up, and it’s an escape that has resonated deeply. “We get some beautiful emails about what the show and the paintings did for them,” says Lurie. “Like, I got someone through the worst thing that ever happened to them, or, ‘As my wife was dying I was watching your show.’” The show sees Lurie’s colourful life mellow into vivid hues through his meditations and stories full of whimsy and humour, with glimpses into the quotidian of our magnetic host at his island home.

Painting was a metier Lurie initially honed in on after a mystery illness 20 years ago caused him neurological issues and severed his relationship with music. He later found out it was advanced Lyme disease. “I really lost music,” he says, “I couldn’t play or listen for a long time. So that was traumatic for me, and I’ve never really dealt with that idea.”

Creating the soundtrack to the show was the culmination of Lurie gradually picking back up the guitar again over the course of a decade. “I came back so gently-gently, working with these musicians again for the show,” he says. “There was just this groove. It was nice to see it on film because I’m just in it – my eyes are closed, and each one of them is just in it. It’s like they’re in another place, but we’re all there together. There was a lot of love there. No matter what, I created this situation, and that gave me a sense of satisfaction: that even if the music sucked, which of course I don’t think it does, we created this moment of people hovering off the ground, and I’m proud of that.”

Painting with John’s gloriously spirited soundtrack is newly released on limited edition vinyl, and, as similarly proven when Anthony Bourdain bought one of his paintings, Lurie is a magnet for fellow icons. “We can see who buys [the LP], and they told me, ‘Wow, Matt Groening bought a record,’” he says. “That was just shocking to me, that he even has any idea… So I wrote to him and said, ‘I heard you bought a record, and it made me happy, I’ve been a fan.’ He wrote back and said, ‘I loved your memoir and I’ve listened to your music for 30 years or something, and your show on HBO made me laugh.’ I was just like… Matt Groening?! It was like when Barry White recognised me. You go back-and-forth, thinking, ‘I am everywhere, I am a big deal, I am important,’ to, ‘I am absolutely nobody.’”

Lurie made the soundtrack specifically to listen to from beginning to end. “I know nobody does it anymore, so I’m an idiot, but I hope just for once, people listen to the whole thing,” he says. “My line is that if you listen to the whole thing uninterrupted, when you finish you’ll be a better person. It’s like ayahuasca, minus the trauma.”

When it comes to his Nine Songs picks, it was a task for such a passionate and album-orientated musician. “It took a lot of thinking and a lot of work,” he says, “and some song choices I had to leave out. One of the things that was hard for me was that it had to be one song and not a whole album, because there are three that are absolutely the whole album.”