4. John ColtraneA Love Supreme

I struggle to listen to a lot of organic music. I can’t listen to guitars, well there’s certain albums I can and certain things that I can, but on the whole my idea of hell is going to watch a live guitar band. I can’t do it, it’s just not me. But for some reason I do listen to a lot of jazz. Like there’s certain areas, like going from hard bop into the more spiritual free-jazz and all that, or people like Miles Davis or Mal Waldron, that do resonate with me and I don’t know why. But A Love Supreme, yeah… I can remember who put me on to this. It was a girl, someone I knew from various sort of drug-taking-in-clubs scenes who was like: "You need to listen to this, you NEED to listen to THIS!"

So I just bought the CD on a random whim in HMV as a result, but I’ve been listening to this album since I was about 17-18. It’s hard for me to sit here and tell you that there’s a reason that I like this, or a specific thing about it but I just think it works as an overall package. It’s one of the most bait jazz albums of all time and so for me to sit there and say, "Oh yeah, big jazz fan" and pick A Love Supreme, it makes me look like a knobhead but there’s a real resonance for me with this album. There’s a nostalgia with listening to it, there’s times I’ve gone through in my life that I’d always associate with this album. I think albums work best when they’re a very specific package and to me this is the perfect flow. There is nothing wrong with this album whatsoever.

To be honest I probably listen to Interstellar Space a lot more now – the eras when it goes a bit more mental and a bit more free – in terms of Coltrane – but there’s the resonance of what A Love Supreme actually means to me. I suppose if you look at my musical upbringing when I first started going out, like, I’m from Liverpool, so all the clubs were playing bait scouse house; like awful music. But that’s how I started DJing. I used to collect like… I wouldn’t say the worst of the worst, not the proper donk end, but I did used to collect these quite cheesy house records that you when you look back at them, you’re like, "Shit, they’re absolute bollocks". But I would say that there were albums like this and weirdly a few things like cLOUDDEAD that were an entry point for me to the idea that there was music out there beyond moody New York rap and house bollocks.