1. David BowieLow
I was a Bowie fan from about 15. I went to see the Ziggy Stardust tour in Sheffield and was kind of blown away as much by the way he looked. The music was fantastic and Low was a really good turning point for him. Station To Station was a fantastic album but to see Bowie embrace electronic music? He did Cabaret Voltaire and a lot of people like us a favour because after Bowie doing that a lot of so-called trendy people got into electronic music. People were getting into Kraftwerk when Trans Europe Express came out in 1977 as well. There was a bubbling under of people embracing electronic stuff. Bowie did it really well. It was cool that he’d split the two sides – one was more rhythmic and ‘normal’ with rock & roll components, and the b-side was almost choral, using loads of Mellotrons and weird chants. It’s a special album. I never met him but he was aware of Cabaret Voltaire. One of my ex-colleagues, Stephen Mallinder, met him somewhere in London in the mid-80s and he said, "Oh yeah, you’ve got ‘Drinking Gasoline’ coming out." That kind of feels good.
