“Interviews are fucking stupid,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Tyler has a very keen eye for colour,” he con­­tinues in his scholastic journalist voice. ​“He noticed the different hues of brown on his shoes.”

I can’t lie. The guy certainly does have a discerning palette.

“You can tell that work early on paid off, or how about the Tamale video where there was three oranges,” he mocks a typical line of questioning.

“Oh my god, fuck my mouth,” he scoffs.

What about the title Igor? Is it a trenchant commentary on personal alienation or perhaps an allusion to Frankenstein’s monster? LOL.

“No, I don’t feel like a monster,” Tyler rolls his eyes. ​“Everyone on Reddit and the message boards with their theories… it’s fucking weird! You be yourself, do your fucking thing, but no, it’s nothing at all. [Igor] is just a sick word.”

“Did you ever see any of the Frankenstein movies?”

“No,” he pauses a beat. ​“I wish I was lying.”

What about Theresa May? Does he harbour any enmity towards her?

“That was then. I’m back in the UK. What now?”

“Your publicist told me to ask what you were excited to do now that you can re-enter the UK,” I tell him.

“I’m going to fuck some people.”

He points out that even the famed Flex appearance wasn’t really a traditional question-and-answer. ​“I just wanted to go on Flex and freestyle and we ended up being best friends for two hours,” he says. ​“I didn’t even come prepared with a verse.”

What Tyler’s saying is revealing but only on his own terms. There is another possibility where you approach a conversation with him by calling him on the games, and pinning down his inconsistencies until he’s backed into a corner. But still, there is no reason for an artist of his stature to risk telling the entire truth. Besides, he’s too smart to fall for a cheap journalistic gambit and, despite the bluster, he’s fundamentally kind and thoughtful.

Tyler’s go-to move is deconstruction. When rap felt relatively safe amidst the Auto-Tune and EDM mash-ups of the late ​’00s, he terrified hip-hop traditionalists, Top 40 apologists, and social puritans with his rape and murder-drenched lyrics that skirted the line between transgressive irony and poor taste. When his generation was still addicted to Tumblr, he founded Golf, a print magazine (since discontinued). At a certain point, his ability to survive off the back of shock value would have run out, but before it did he subverted the 1950s utopian ideal (summer camps, long bike rides, carnivals) to give it a weird modern currency. If the face tatts and Xanax indulgences of Soundcloud rappers are the trite modern rebellion, Tyler countered with something that melded Norman Rockwell to Barbara Kruger.

“We got a boat and a lake, bro,” he describes his new world. ​“We gonna have a little disco dance party. Everyone’s invited and everyone is fucking whatever they want. Come have a good time.”

Tyler has a No.1 album, a clothing line that presumably rakes in tens of millions and thus no more need to stoke for any more controversy.

“I got cancelled before all these niggas,” he exclaims. ​“This ain’t no Twitter little cancelled shit, bro. I got dropped from corporations. I got banned from countries, I got for real cancelled before that was a Twitter hashtag. That’s why I’m like, ​‘Nigga, I’m not scared, I’ll say what the fuck I want. What the fuck y’all gonna do? Get 3,000 retweets? You gonna pull up an old tweet?’ Nigga, Goblin is in stores right now.”