11. Primal Scream
When I listen to this, I can pinpoint exactly where I was when I was playing it a lot. I can remember all the details of the room, the pattern of the wallpaper, and the view out of the window. It’s imprinted in my brain. I love it when that happens. It’s like an aural photograph.
I’d just moved to a flat in an old building in Brighton, and the main room was a ballroom. It was one of those old, Regency squares, and it was all decorated in quite a Regency style. I’d lived in Brighton for a long time but I’d moved around. I always say, if you’re gonna live near the sea, then make sure you can see it out of your window – and the view was absolutely stunning. I was only renting it, and it was hopelessly impractical. It had no heating, so in the winter, it was absolutely freezing. But it was big, and it had room for my records in it, and this big ballroom, which was a great room for parties. It was a great room to listen to music in.
The term "blissed-out" was invented about that time, and ‘Higher Than The Sun’ was very much this sort of blissed-out, psychedelic tune of that whole period. Because it’s so ethereal, it actually reminds me a bit of the Eric Satie track, although they’re stylistically completely different. It was a fairly short time I was in that flat – it wasn’t practical to stay there. But for that period in the early 90s, that album and that tune said it all. It was a moment in time.
