2. David Bowie”Heroes”
It was obviously quite strange that Bowie should make an album in Germany and call it “Heroes”, and Neu 75 just so happened to have a track on it called ‘Hero’. If you listen to the two of them, you can’t say he ripped them off, but there’s a certain… he was obviously listening to Neu! And I think with Brian Eno – if you like – dropping the acid on his music and encouraging him to break it down into fractures and play with sound textures, you get my favourite David Bowie album. The first album I actually ever bought by him was Ziggy Stardust, and I loved that album and Aladdin Sane. Wasn’t so keen on what I consider to be the American albums, but I did quite like the singles ‘Fame’ and ‘Golden Years’, but then when he did Low, I thought, “okay, Bowie’s back”. I liked what he did with his voice; his voice was his main instrument. He tortured his voice into these amazing sounds. He would multi-track himself and have these really quite amazing textures. That and the way he looked, were actually the most interesting things about him. Musically, he wasn’t that exciting – I didn’t think – until Low. “Heroes”, though, was just another level. Some of the tracks on there are just really dark. When I started touring with the band, we drove down the corridor to Berlin — the city itself was quite glamorous, but getting there was dark and dreary, and it looked like it hadn’t been painted for 40 years – because it hadn’t – so suddenly I’d got this darkness of East Germany, even though Bowie was in West Berlin. This album had captured this severe melancholy and sombre attitude. It does also happen to have one of the greatest songs EVER on it, I mean ‘Heroes’ just rolls. It just propels itself. Bowie doesn’t even need to sing! But when he does it’s amazing, but before that it’s just swinging! I was talking to someone about this the other day, and sometimes when you do an interview someone can throw you, and they said “the way Bowie sings ‘Heroes’ is the way you sing some of your songs, how he starts low and goes higher” and I thought: “Actually, you’re right. It must’ve been a more subconscious influence!” So there you go, unbeknownst to me, Bowie influenced my singing style!
