13. Tangerine DreamPhaedra
This was massively successful without any promotion. Fantastic. What I always said about that was that there were a lot of heads in England – countercultural dope-smoking types – who were under the radar but there were a lot of them. I’d say a similar thing to Agharta in that it was something I remember listening to at Chris’s with a spliff or whatever and just really getting into it. I also remember seeing them live at Sheffield City Hall. Tangerine Dream weren’t as influential as, say, Can or Neu! on Cabaret Voltaire but the interesting stuff was that they were using sequencers, which was quite new at that time. I honestly don’t know if something could succeed like this today. I despair of music. There’s too much fucking music and too much rubbish. It was all very underground, people were quite guarded about the music they got whereas now it’s instant and shared and maybe it’s a good thing, but it’s really just difficult to know where to start in terms of finding music to listen to that’s saying something new. The notion of politicisation or protest – everything now seems like entertainment. It all seemed quite dangerous and subversive back then.
