5. The NormalWarm Leatherette
John Foxx introduced me to ‘Warm Leatherette.’ I was making Metamatic with him, the first album as a young sound engineer I made from top to bottom. John was a great mentor, and I was on a steep learning curve, having a great time. He came in one day with this record and said, ‘Check this out.’ I think the record was already out before I started working on Metamatic, but I hadn’t heard it. What I got from punk was not the music, because I didn’t like much punk music really, but I liked the fact that we could do it ourselves. I’m very self-taught, and that was hugely inspirational, and here, clearly, was a person doing electronics. Daniel [Miller]’s been a dear friend for many decades now, but at that time, I hadn’t met him, obviously. I was an electronics dude reaping the do-it-yourself ethic of the punk movement, and that really resonated.
Again, it’s beautifully minimal. It’s a four-track recording. Every element counts, and there’s room for every element, and that’s so important. That’s so much of what we tried to do on A Walk in the Woods, the Nous Alpha record – leave space so that you can enjoy and hear every element. It was inspirational, but we were making Metamatic at the time as well, which is a different kind of thing. But there’s a North London electronic minimal vibe in Metamatic and ‘Warm Leatherette.’
