1. PavementSlanted & Enchanted
I think Slanted… is now regarded as a very important record. I saw somewhere, in NME or something like that, that it came really high up in a list of influential records. Which is really weird in a way because when I first liked them no-one knew who they were! [Laughs]. One person at university, James Parry, became my best friend and an influential one too, because of Pavement. I had a Pavement t-shirt on and he came up to me and asked, "do you like Pavement?" And I said yeah. And we became best friends. No-one else liked them at first. It takes a bit of time to get into them I suppose. It’s not like they excel at anything musically. It’s not obvious music either. I like the ragtag nature of it all, it’s raw, and I think they are genuinely lo-fi. And I think they can be genuinely poetic without being all flouncy and that. I’ve only seen them at Reading festival and no-one paid them any attention.
