1. The BeatlesThe Beatles
We’re keen on the White Album because of the way we’re making a lot of this music now. I feel like they had a lot of music, and they weren’t that worried about the very nuanced production they had delved into with George Martin. It’s one of those records that’s kind of sloppy, recorded in strange rooms. It has this weirder, drug-damaged vibe about it.
For me, I think that The Beatles could not be any greater of a group without a song like ‘Revolution 9’. I wouldn’t have embraced them as much. Even though I was very young I always thought ‘Revolution 9’ was just as valid, just as listenable, just as perfect as ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, something that has a lot of structure, melody, lyrics. I didn’t realise until later how retarded that was. When we started writing songs and learning how to produce records we started to see what a strange, disturbing collage it is.
Luckily, that was what I built my world of creating music on: thinking anything that you wanted to do was possible. They’ll have these experimental moments, and even Paul McCartney, who’s perhaps not as artistically experimental, there’s that thing, [sings] "Can you take me back where I came from" [the fragment that follows ‘Cry Baby Cry’]. [It’s] Thirty seconds of him not really having a song. Listening to that when I was young, somehow, is the cornerstone to me remembering that anything’s possible – that you don’t have to worry about thinking everything through before you do it.
