Laura Nyro – Eli And The Thirteenth Confession

I got into her in about 1991. I only did it because I used to buy records that I thought looked interesting. I look back on that time now and wonder if I bought it because she looked a little bit like me.

But I bought this and New York Tendaberry and I absolutely fell in love with both. I was going through a bit of a difficult time at that point with some love life rubbish, and in Eli, there are a lot of beautiful songs about love and loss. Some of it’s quite theatrical. You can imagine the songs as part of a musical, the way they stop and start, all the different tempos. You can imagine someone acting them out. My favourite track on it is ‘Poverty Train’ which I think is about cocaine. I saw her live in 1994, when I was going out with the journalist Ted Kessler, at the Union Chapel. Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs were there too. It’s funny what you remember, isn’t it? I was so chuffed to see her, just her and the piano. She died very young a few years later [in 1997, at the age of 49]. I felt very lucky that I saw her.