Baker's Dozen

Artists discuss the 13 records that shaped their lives

7. John ColtraneA Love Supreme

I was a young, precocious seventeen-year-old and this was what I listened to all the time on my Walkman. I had grown up with it. There were deep musicians around us all the time, painters and people into jazz, so I knew I had a feeling for it. The flat was a hub of bohemian appreciation. I learnt that John Coltrane was better than everyone else because he was melodic. Some of the atonal ones, that was all a bit too much. That’s what was played here all the time. I moved out of home when I was 16 and we had a house in Shepherd’s Bush. A shithole, one of the rooms was the dustbin, and that was what I listened to, to the absolute horror of everyone else there, smoking their shit spliffs.

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