9. Radio-Activity
I have a confession to make, I think I was standing just near you at the Tate for ‘Radioactivity’
Were you? Did you see me and Paul acting like schoolboys when the melody to ‘Airwaves’ came on? I grabbed him by the lapel and went: “Aaaaaaargh!” They came out of the song before and it was in the same order, and I just turned to Paul and went [sings start of ‘Airwaves’]. Oh we were kids. We were kids all over again. That was the one we had to go to, because although Autobahn was the one that got us into Kraftwerk, Radio-Activity was the bible. Autobahn, Radio-Activity and Trans-Europe Express are the holy triumvirate. They were the three greatest albums of any triptych – to my mind – those three albums completely changed the whole fucking world. They certainly changed mine. And I think for a couple of teenagers from a suburb of Liverpool with no money, we were listening to this going, “Well, they got Geiger counters, and chopped up voices and tuning radios and we can do that!” Completely inspirational because we had fuck all – I had a left handed bass guitar and Paul had bits of circuit boards taken out of radios that he had welded together to make weird noises with, because we didn’t have anything that had a keyboard attached to it, and so Radio-Activity was absolutely the be all and end all, and we listened to it incessantly round at Paul’s house.
