The Quietus - A new rock music and pop culture website

Baker's Dozen

Lay Of Her Land: Brix Smith Start's Favourite Albums
Julian Marszalek , December 15th, 2016 11:19

As she prepares to release a debut album with her band of former Fall troopers, Brix Smith Start takes Julian Marszalek through some of the records that have shaped her life

Bowie_1481734596_resize_460x400

David Bowie – Hunky Dory
I have OCD but not the usual kind. I only get it with music and food. So I will listen to the same album over and over and over and over and over until I can longer take it and know every single thing about it. And I then sometimes go back to it. Now, Hunky Dory was one of those ones that just never left me. So was Slates by The Fall but weirdly I didn't put that on this list because it's an EP.

But Hunky Dory… I can't tell you exactly why but again I think there's so much going on around me personally that it became a soundtrack of my life. I just love the sound of this album: the guitars, the piano, the mix. And there's just something about it. You could say Ziggy Stardust…, too, but for me, there's something more innocent about Hunky Dory and less contrived although having said that, Ziggy Stardust… is still fucking genius.

It moved on from The Man Who Sold The World and developed. You can see the progression of how he's developing as an artist and how his mind is going and maybe there's a lot of movement throughout the album. There's a momentum going through it so maybe the energy of his own creativity is really firing then. It hasn't quite formed into the Ziggy thing. The Man Who Sold The World had it's own thing with the flowing dress on the cover but that was only the seed of it.