Bob Tilton - Crescent

This record really introduced me to this whole world of British music that was happening under the radar of the music press and the music industry in general. I used to read NME and Melody Maker and look at the gig listings just to look at band names and it was a name that always really stood out for some reason. I ended up going to see Mogwai and they supported. I didn’t realise that it was a band; I thought it was a singer songwriter guy called Bob Tilton. That was around the time where it felt like I was going to gigs and being more impressed by the bands supporting than the band that I was going to see. I ended up getting this CD and being really taken aback by the booklet that contained these sheets of tracing paper and loads of really interesting looking art and lyrics. You know when you get an album when you’re young and you can just tell there’s a lot that’s gone into it.

I think this album introduced me to the DIY aesthetic properly. Seeing that the records had been released previously by a label called Subjugation, so from then on I became semi-obsessed with trying to track down as many Subjugation releases as I could, which wasn’t easy at the time.

tQ: Were you playing in bands by this point?

This would have been around 1999 or 2000, so I was playing guitar, but I wasn’t in any sort of bands until a couple of years after that. But I would say that me playing music and being involved in music in a DIY context, that definitely all came from being into bands like Bob Tilton. I’d say it was a pretty important thing to discover at that time of my life.