Morphine - The Night

Morphine are one of the first bands I loved. Hip hop’s the music that unlocked my brain, the first ‘genre’ of music I really identified with or that spoke to me, but when I was about 10 years old I had three bands I liked that were my brother’s bands. Primus were my favourite band, I loved Danzig, and then there was Morphine. My brother had an old Morphine T-shirt with a crudely drawn drumkit and saxophone and two string bass. He gave it to me at some point when I was like 10 and I used to wear it to school, I didn’t know what morphine was, either as a band or a drug! Then years later at one of my pawn shop digs I found the album Like Swimming, the album before The Night, and just fell in love with this strange band. Mark Sandman the singer was another guy with this great, deep voice that gave so much to these things, and playing it against this modified two string bass he’d play with a slide.

The Night was released posthumously because Mark Sandman died on stage at a show in Italy. They have this interesting thing on all their albums, they have slow songs and jazzy elements and then these blues rockers, but the the way this record opens, it’s so beautiful to me and still speaks to me.