9. De La Soul3 Feet High And Rising

Out of all that bleakness and gloom in the 80s came this record, which was like Sesame Street in comparison. I was into Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy. This sounded like jazz, as though they’d been listening to John Coltrane, but they looked like they were having fun on MTV, revelling in a landscape of childishness. 

3 Feet High And Rising was a perfect, upbeat ending to three years in Sheffield, because it drew in elements of everything I listened to when I was younger. It sounded like it was designed for our playground. 

Like The Happy Mondays, some of the lyrics were nonsensical. You get that word play in literature, it’s not too far off James Joyce. But the thing is, Joyce was never far away from the street anyway. He wrote about being ejected from the Gate Theatre one night in ‘Satire On The Brothers Fay’. In the poem he gets drunk, says it’s a load of crap, and he falls down rat-arsed in the gutter, ‘For I lay in my urine / While ladies so pure in / White petticoats ravished my gaze.’ He wanted that street sound in his writing, the sound of the person selling the newspaper. He wanted the sound of a person drunk. All of this goes into Finnegans Wake. I return to him often.