Television - Marquee Moon
We were doing a press junket to the US, just me and Bon, and some of it was done with this budding A&R guy who drove us around New York. We were sat in some posh hotel and having a few drinks, and he started talking about Television. He was impassioned, saying how he'd learned to play guitar from scratch by listening to and copying Tom Verlaine and within a year or two he'd become a competent player. Our interest in guitars was starting to grow, we'd done Ebbhead - we actually used a sample from 'Marquee Moon' on 'Ascend'… because nobody could play that [laughs]. Having this guy talking about how his entire musical approach was based on one performance by a single guitarist on an album that collectively... the production was amazing, the lyrically it's great, I love the way Tom Verlaine's voice is just screeching at such a weird pitch. And it's a really funny album, then there's all those happy accents like the Mapplethorpe picture on the front was just a Polaroid test but was the one they went with, which apparently he hated.