1. The Jimi Hendrix ExperienceAxis: Bold As Love
The first record I had was this. I couldn’t afford the original version and Track Records put out a £1 version of it in a green cover, and that’s what I bought. And I just absorbed everything in it. I mean, to this day, I can probably quote every lyric and every bit in it. It was the seed that started me on this path. Without hearing it, none of this would have happened. And that’s the thing that connected me to Robert Smith, because he comes up to me in the library one day, and he says, ‘Do you like Jimi Hendrix?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m a member of the UK fan club,’ and he said, ‘Me too!’ So he was the only other person I knew that that liked Hendrix.
People would walk around back in the 70s with those big army surplus coats, and your hair was down [to the chest], right? And you’d carry your albums in one of those old gas mask bags and you’d write band names on the back. And then you would know from what somebody had written on the bag, or what albums they were carrying under their arms, if you were going to be friends. And Robert had that album, [original Cure bassist] Michael Dempsey had that album, I had that album, and we knew from that, okay, that means this is going to work; we had the same touchstones. And that’s the thing that I have with Budgie. We have the same touchstones when it comes to a lot of music. The Cure covered Hendrix on our first album with ‘Foxy Lady’ with Michael Dempsey being the only other person [apart from Robert Smith] to ever sing a lead vocal for the band.
I loved Mitch Mitchell’s drumming when I first heard it. To me, it was from another planet. There’s those bits at the end where they have the out of phase drums and they flange it all in and it goes straight back in, and he does his huge, long fill, and I’m like, ‘How do you do that with two bits of wood in your hand and your feet?’ I had no idea, and I just spent a lot of time listening to it and trying to figure out. That album, there’s a lot of Hendrix songs on it. He does what he’s famous for, but he writes great songs here. I mean, ‘Spanish Castle Magic’ is such a beautiful song.
