10. Brian EnoBefore & After Science
I don’t really put a lot of lyrical content into what we do because I don’t think it’s my strong point and I prefer the listener to make up their own mind on what the song is about and how it feels to them, so I use snippets of sentences. It’s all about sound. But I do like words in songs, which is why I like Brian Eno’s Before & After Science. "Backwater… not a sausage to do…" I love it! [laughs]. It’s like Throbbing Gristle, "what a day what a day", it sounds like a madman walking along a river back speaking out loud. ‘Here He Comes’ reminds me of ‘Hedda Gabler’ by John Cale. There are all these gibberish words going on, and it’s the opposite to what I do, where I only have a few words. On this album, he really filled it out with words didn’t he? Thats why I like Mark E Smith to… "take the chicken run to the toilet" in ‘Smile’, it’s that unexpectedness of having these words stuck in a song, and you have to do a double take. I like how there’s one side that starts with ‘Backwater’, then there’s another couple of tracks, then on the same side it fades back up again at the end. That’s when I realised you could mess about with the format on records, you can chop it up. That’s when I recognised that the record is an object, making my own record for ‘Gold E’ it was working out that you could make the format work for yourself as opposed to just laying tracks down, you can play with it.
