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I was at the art college just out of the city centre, on Psalter Lane when I bought this record. Annette’s ‘Dream 17’ is a spacey track and the one I listened to most. Whenever I hear it, if I’m out, it reminds me of the Cocteau Twins; it has that haunted Liz Fraser quality. 

Everything I was listening to around the time this came out was in a feedback loop of itself. I could hear the connections. This manifested in the work I was making. I was interested in regurgitating. In the end, I became, and we all became, very 80s. We were entrenched in critical theory. Lyotard, Baudrillard. It was all about screams, semiotics, non-authenticity, everything was a rehash, a copy, a simulacra. Music was based on sampling, and the video work I made reflected that. Painting seemed very archaic and macho back then. There was a lot of the Glasgow School, where everyone was trying to be Anselm Kiefer. And I just thought that the media of everyday experience, like photography, sound, television, was the best method of communicating from one human being to another, because it was more immediate, more of its day. Painting seemed fake.

In time, I realised the technical stuff was beyond me. It moved so fast and I had to learn so much. You have to talk to someone every day. I just wanted to be left alone, and I saw the interest that I have in art, communicating with one human being to another is really because, for most of the time, I don’t want to do that with another human being. Art becomes the way of you having that conversation instead, so in the end, I started to paint. 

When this North album came out, it was in HMV or Virgin. There was a group of artists my girlfriend was in at the time. They had studios on Blast Lane, they’d put on warehouse parties, where they’d push all the paintings to one side, and set up a soundsystem. I liked watching it all go off, and how simple it was, how straightforward. It was 1988. I went to the Haçienda once around that time. We drove with a gay couple from Barnsley, right over the Snake Pass, then parked the car outside on Whitworth Street, went into the club, came out, and then drove home again. Too many queues, too many people. I didn’t like it at all.