2. LoveForever Changes

Yorkie [aka David Palmer] had a cellar where the Teardrop Explodes and the Bunnymen used to rehearse. Julian [Cope]’s enthusiasm was infectious and he’d play Yorkie all kinds of music. We’d use their equipment at the weekend, and Yorkie would have his record player in the middle of the rehearsal room playing album after album. When he played Forever Changes it was like, ‘Hang on a minute!’ He let me go home with the record and just like with Aladdin Sane it was like something was saying to me, ‘This is going to be important to you for the rest of your life’. I used to play it to our John [Head, brother and future bandmate] because we were always close and shared a room growing up. We had this game where we’d play an album or a cassette, and give it points out of 10 to see how we’d both judged it. Nothing ever got 10. There’d be eights, sevens, the odd nine. We played Forever Changes, and he said ‘Let’s see yours,’ and I said ‘G’wed, what’ve you got then?’ And well, it was a 10, wasn’t it? ‘It’s gotta be 10!’ Love blew us away from top to toe.

In Liverpool [Love frontman] Arthur Lee was a god, so when [in the 1990s] our manager said, ‘He wants someone to back him for Paris, London and Liverpool,’ we said ‘Yeah! Too right!’ I phoned his agent in LA and said ‘What songs d’you want us to do?’ He goes, ‘Well what songs do you know?’ I said, ‘All of them.’ I wasn’t being blasé, I wanted to cut to the quick. I explained to him that we were learning stuff like ‘You Set The Scene’ and ‘The Red Telephone’ in our bedroom, that they were quite intricate but we had them under our belts.

Is it true Arthur Lee proposed to your sister during those shows?

It’s true, yeah! He was quite… spontaneous!