4. Roxy MusicRoxy Music
They were big. There was a kind of movement of odd people who wore outrageous clothes in Sheffield – kind of theatrical people who you might have seen at Kraftwerk concerts in later years – and Roxy Music were tremendously influential, not least of all on Cabaret Voltaire because of some of the stuff that Eno was saying in interviews about ‘non-music’ and not needing to learn an instrument. Eno had also mentioned a few of the German bands. So stuff filtered through – obviously there was no Internet back then – it was trickier to find things out. I saw Roxy Music quite a few times and they were just amazing, especially on the first album and things like ‘Ladytron’. I remember it was described in some magazine as "the most psychedelic record since The Electric Prunes ‘I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night’." That’s a pretty good description! Things like the ‘The Bob (Medley)’, with that mixing of rock & roll with sci-fi, was totally new to a lot of people and certainly to me. The first time I saw them, we sneaked in. There was a gang of us associated with Cabaret Voltaire that were really into music and clothes, and we managed to sneak in when they played at a students’ hall of residence named Ranmoor Hall.
