1. The Velvet UndergroundThe Velvet Underground & Nico
I heard or read David Bowie talking about the influence of The Velvet Underground so I bought the first album, maybe I was 13, and played it. ‘What the fuck is this?’ You know, every song is different. It didn’t make any sense to me at my naïve young age and I just couldn’t understand it, and traded it in for something else, probably entirely insignificant. A couple of years later was when the first vinyl box set came out [in 1986] and there was a South Bank Show documentary. I was ready for the Velvets at that age. From that moment, they’ve always been my fundamental band. I went completely overboard into them. I was trading cassettes and VHS tapes with people through the mail. Before the internet was invented, there was a network of us exchanging badly recorded but completely essential Velvet Underground live tapes. The first song my first band learned to play was ‘Waiting For The Man’.
I’d also become aware of Andy Warhol through David Bowie. That South Bank Show totally encompasses the whole New York counter-cultural scene – underground films, which became really important for me later in life. It was that whole world of The Factory and the band existing in The Factory with all these interesting people doing different kinds of art. I wanted to live in New York in the late 60s, when frankly I was in Chesterfield.
