5. Can – Tago Mago
There’s an idea of punk being an hour zero movement, but The Stooges had been going for ages and they were punk rock. The MC5 were punk rock. And Hawkwind… I think punk rock started because in every small town there was somebody who liked Hawkwind. I liked all the records on United Artists – it sounds stupid liking groups because of the label – but Hawkwind were on United Artists, and so were Can. They were fantastic; Tago Mago is another record like Neu!, because there’s nothing else that sounds like it. Subsequently, there have been things that have tried to sound like it, but it was completely original. I used to make cassettes of Tago Mago and go and sit in a field – I don’t know why – to play it there in the middle of the night, because it seemed like the best way to listen to it. I wasn’t very old; 13 or 14, playing Tago Mago in a field on my own with a cassette player running out of battery. The cows didn’t mind.
