V/Vm – Sick Love

The first time I ever saw V/Vm was at Sonar Festival in Barcelona in about 2000. Firstly, Sonar Festival was massively influential for Jenny [Moore] and I in terms of starting Supersonic. The idea that you could have a festival in a contemporary art gallery and not in a field. We saw V/vm perform in this beautiful gothic church, it was Coil and V/vm and Merzbow. V/vm are very performative and wore this chicken-pig costume and a giant love heart. There were two of them.

They had these two cabbages on the decks that they'd obviously bought from the market in Barcelona and then some giant hams. There were bits of meat juice and cabbage being flung into the audience. And then the music, they take quite well-known pop songs and just completely disintegrate them and distort them. I had just never seen or heard anything like this in my life before and I was blown away by it. I was like, “We need to do more of this!”

As a vegetarian, having bits of meat juice flying out is really grotty, but it was just so bonkers. They played the very first Supersonic in 2003 and then we also had them play a couple of other shows in our year-round programme as well. They were just so witty as well. On this album they've got a track called ‘Take My Beef Away’, which is obviously based on Berlin's ‘Take My Breath Away’. It's quite childish humour, but it tickled me.