10. R.E.M.Automatic For The People
One of the classic albums. Played it to death. I was pissed off when it came out, it was when the Bunnymen had just split up and it would have inspired me with the band. When he gets it right, Michael Stipe, he’s just brilliant. It’s not that kind of American music that makes you feel queasy like The Eagles, it’s more indie. When you go to America and see some of the natural beautiful vastness of the country, it moves you onto your kneecaps, the prairie beauty of it. ‘Find The River’ – when I heard that it was instant choking up. I went up to my missus at the time and didn’t know if I could speak. I wrote ‘Nothing Ever Lasts Forever’ after it. I don’t know if it was inspired by it. It made me like a type of American that I’ve never liked, the Mark Twainy kind. For some reason it connected with me, but the last thing I’d like to do is buy a pair of dungarees and go net fishing in a stagnant pond. But each to their own – Stipey obviously does it. The videos and the bit in ‘Man In The Moon’ where he does the little shuffle and the Elvis “hey baby” – when I saw that I thought, you twat, you’ve got it completely right, and here’s me hacking about with some half-baked solo songs. And they were half-baked, some of them from Mysterio. But after Automatic they did too much and a lot of it wasn’t up to that standard.
