10. Richard YoungsSapphie
I like all Richard Youngs. Richard Youngs never released a record that I didn’t like, I’m into his foot guitar series where he only plays with his foot, and he somehow sounds better than most guitar players playing with their hands. He has a new kind of series he’s doing now, which has a little more vocals and percussion. But I picked the most classic Richard Youngs because it seemed to be somewhat of an umbrella that all the other Richard Youngs can fit under.
I first heard Richard Youngs with his work with Simon Wickham-Smith and I knew his noisier stuff up until then. And then when this record came out, I didn’t understand how the same person could be doing that. It really did not make sense to me. And it took me a while to figure out how this guy who I knew from much more noisy stuff was doing that, and then I figured it out. I’m like, oh, it’s because he’s a genius, that’s how he’s doing this. Because he can do anything and he’s one of my favourite musicians around. His stuff is a lot more expansive and varied than Six Organs stuff is. But when I get mad about being put into a certain genre or whatever, you know, when people say, ‘well what do you want to be called?’ I often say, ‘Whatever you call Richard Youngs, that’s what I wish that I was called.’ He doesn’t really have a genre that you can put him in. It’s something for me that I like to aspire to. I don’t know if I can ever shake off any of the genres that have been cast on me, but for me, Richard Youngs is somebody to look up to. Out of all of the people on this list, he’s kind of a hero. And someone I could say, having met him, that I really like him a lot too. It’s just a positive extra that he also happens to be one of the nicest human beings on the planet. I met him when he came over for a tour in the United States and I’ve met him over in the UK sometimes, and so that’s just a plus, that he’s also one of the nicest people that I know. I just love Richard.
