1. Buddy Holly & The Crickets20 Golden Greats
For me, when I was a little kid, and I was nine or ten years old, I was really into movies like Stand By Me and La Bamba: ’50s-centric movies. And I’m getting the period slightly mixed up, but one of my other favourites was The Buddy Holly Story. I was just obsessed with it. I don’t know why exactly. But years later, when I was in college, I met somebody and I remember my brother trying to figure out my attraction to this guy, because he didn’t care for him particularly, and then he said: "Oh, I know why you like him – he reminds you of Gary Busey playing Buddy Holly." And it’s true – he kind of looked like him.
That’s kind of an aside but many of the reasons I wanted to move to New York were to do with movies and music. That scene – of course, it wasn’t shot in New York – where they show him walking down Fifth Avenue to his apartment near Washington Square Park where he recorded all those amazing demos: I think that’s partly why I wanted to live in New York City. I mean, I’m not even saying anything about the songs. The songs are just… the songs. And as a kid, it never even crossed my mind that he died when he was 22. That voice, and the maturity of the work, it couldn’t possibly have come from someone so young.
