5. DAF – Alles Is Gut
This blew my mind. I was about 15. There was Parrot Records in Chelmsford, and I wanted to buy Die Kleinen Und De Bösen but you had to save up, and they were on import – the same with Die Mensch-Maschine by Kraftwerk, which Dave had on German import and sold to me for a fiver. That was ’78, ’79, and then Computer World was the first album I ever pre-ordered. It was that process of the assimilation of other people’s purchases and ideas and you’re starting to build up a structure of what you want to listen to. My whole list is that, an assimilation of other people’s knowledge. It was the straight-up energy of DAF that appealed to us, a bunch of teenagers in Essex. They sounded like our parties and our skate sessions – chaos, violence and self-destructiveness. Gabi of DAF said to me one time, ‘out of all our children, Nitzer Ebb has always been our favourite child’.
