13. David BowieLow
I bought all of Bowie’s records from Hunky Dory onwards, up until Scary Monsters. I thought every record was fantastic, just groundbreaking. Whether or not I liked the music, I still respected the fact it was out there and different.
I was surprised by this being one of your choices. It’s one of those albums that you tend to hear of as an influence from more electronic contemporaries of yours. People like OMD or The Human League.
They fucking wish, man! I fucking love Low. I remember being in Dingwalls, it must have been about ’76 or whenever, and I was with Joe Strummer and ‘Sound And Vision’ come on. We were like: ‘Fucking hell!’ Just to hear that drum sound. We’d never heard anything like that before. At the time it would have perhaps been something that you wouldn’t have expected me to like. I like the B-side as well, all the instrumental stuff. I love all those deconstructed pop songs on side one. Very short and in and out, they just burst in and then they finish. ‘Sound And Vision’, ‘Be My Wife’, with that mad bar-room piano. What I like about those songs is that it’s like you’ve walked in mid-conversation or mid-thought, so suddenly it just changes tack. I like the idea of that. I think there’s a little bit of influence, if I may say so, on some of the lyrics I’ve written recently. Where it’s almost like dipping in mid-stream and then they dart off and they’re about something else. Hopefully people will find their own meaning in them.
With your new album, particularly the last three or four tracks, it sounds like any idea you had you would chase it.
It was like that. There are at least two or three songs where I didn’t necessarily have a bridge or a chorus, so we’d just leave a space. There might just be something keeping time and we’d try different ideas on top of it, just building the picture up. It’s sometimes a bit scary because you don’t know whether it’s going to work, but there’s something liberating about that. You don’t know where a song’s going to go, but it could be someplace you never even dreamt of.
