2. David Bowie
Back around the time of punk, I had a girlfriend who absolutely loved David Bowie, just adored him. She gave me a copy of Heroes. That was a game changer for me. Bowie just completely blew my mind, especially his work with Eno. Of course they’re all great, from Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane on, but I love the Berlin trilogy the most.
If you think back to your mid-to-late teens, you’ll probably remember you were an angst ridden and an earnest chappie! I certainly was, at least some of the time. So this music fitted perfectly for me. But it wasn’t Heroes that made the most impact but ‘Warszawa’ from Low. I love side two, it’s absolute genius. In truth, the music isn’t such a big shift in some ways from the orchestration of Genesis. Just around this time Peelie had been changing his playlist. You can’t underestimate how weird it was, listening to such a change! And just as I left school, punk was really starting to happen and all these things in my life started to happen and change, all at once.
It’s usually girls who are much more mature and switched on than us guys. I was juggling things in my life, like football and further education and wondering what to do, and my then-girlfriend told me to just go and do what made me happy, and not to get so hung up about things! I was reading a lot, whether literature or the music press, anything. And one of the great things about reading the music press like the NME every week, was that you learnt about things from the bands you liked. A big favourite of mine was Josef K. The sort of stuff they were doing was very intriguing. A lot of those Postcard bands were into really interesting books and just ways of thinking, really. A lot of the bands were also quite political and particularly post-punk bands; I had latched onto that as well. It all kind of fitted in. I was fortunate in that many of the political stances reflected mine. I wasn’t aping them in any way.
And if you listen to Bowie you can feel and see punk and post-punk coming. He always gives you a way. You can go anywhere with Bowie, right?
