9. KraftwerkComputer World
I don’t really care if this was considered a concept album. What I do like is how they have motifs moving from song to song, in the same way a film soundtrack would maybe take a motif and have it not just in the one piece, but going through different pieces with the same motif running through it.
What I like most about the album is how it’s about computers. But it was made before we were using computers to make music. These little rhythms aren’t created by computers, they’re created either by analogue synthesisers or drums are actually played.
I saw them in Glasgow when this album came out. Two of the guys were playing the drums. The concert was amazing. There’s one song that I don’t love, ‘Numbers’. ‘Computer Love’ is one of the best songs ever written by anybody and it’s a great lyric as well: “I want to rendezvous”. Very simple but beautiful melodies. That’s the one Coldplay made that awful version of – the less said about that the better!
You have great songwriting and maybe the best sounding record made with synthesisers ever. You have this minimalism which is a combination of everything I love on one record [laughs]. When people ask me what my favorite record is, depending on what day it is, it’s either Highway 61… or Computer World.
It’s the perfectly constructed album. Even though one of the tracks is weak, it doesn’t really matter because contextually, that track works within the album. Even though I don’t like it as much as the other tracks, if I was playing Computer World, I wouldn’t skip the one that I don’t like because I like the way it works in context.
