9. Laurie AndersonUnited States Live
It’s another live-recorded record, which I do like and not just because of Carter Tutti Void. I like them because you can’t go back and fix it and it feels like a more honest way of listening to what an artist has done. It’s a very vulnerable position that they’ve put themselves in, and if it makes sense on record then you can relive what they went through. I think this was 1984. She did a series of performances, but wasn’t really a recording artist as such, and I suppose that’s linked to what I was just saying – you learn these things and then the next step is to write a record and you’re then represented on the record and that’s you. She did her stuff through live performance, and this is probably closest to a record out of anything she made. It had ‘O Superman’ on it, which came into Big Science, but even that wasn’t an album where she said ‘I’m going to sit down and record’, it was a collection of a load of material that she had. This has got a lot of narrative, spoken-word element, her manipulation of electronics and violin, and I think she used a tape violin, so again it’s instruments that she had made to suit the sound in her head that she wanted to get out there. I think ‘O Superman’ is Gabe [Gurnsey, Factory Floor drummer)’s favourite track… and what is Gabe as a personality when I first met him? Not melodramatic…arghh melancholic, ha ha he will kill me if he reads this. I like how though ‘O Superman’ was a hit it didn’t change her as an artist, she returned back to her investigations of what she was doing with her work.
