1. R.E.M.Up

I don’t remember my parents ever taking the piss out of what I listened to. They loved all different kinds of music. When I was 10 or 11 my dad bought this JVC hi-fi. There was a problem with it – the remote control wasn’t working or something. We took it back and they gave us another one but let us keep the broken one. So my dad had this massive fuck-off hi-fi, and I then had the original massive fuck-off hi-fi. I made tapes scouring the radio from BBC, commercial stations; pirate radio stations. I was aware of R.E.M., my dad maybe had an album or two, and I asked for Up for Christmas. I remember putting it on, Christmas morning, and thinking ‘wow, this is so good’. It didn’t ever strike me as weird. 

We also had this amazing music department at secondary school run by Mrs. Sutton and Mrs. Spalding who were like Eastern Bloc secretaries. In the first lesson Mrs. Sutton said she went to punk rock concerts and classical concerts. She’d been to see something where somebody lifted the lid of the piano and didn’t play anything. As an 11-year-old, that sounded fantastic. It was only years later I realised she’d seen 4’33” by John Cage. They had tubular bells, computers, Atari keyboards, and there was a metal staircase I’d play on when I went to the toilet. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t play any conventional instruments, but I really like these weird acoustic sounds and these keyboards’. I was just a kid, so I didn’t really appreciate that it might be ‘electroacoustic’, me poncing around playing a metal staircase.