1. The Unknown Cases‘Masimbabele’
So I first heard this on John Peel. I can’t remember when, but it’s definitely pre-Acid House. It was probably when I was still living in Yorkshire at the farm I grew up on. I’m from a very, very rural part of Yorkshire; my parents were farmers. The nearest pub was seven miles away. So, we were really, really isolated. I spent the majority of my time knocking around by myself. And the things that we were available to do at that age were riding a bike, going fishing, shooting things with an airgun, or listening to music. So when somebody bought me a knock-off Sony Walkman I started buying cassettes with my pocket money, back when I was maybe 10 or 11. I’d go to Grinstead’s in Driffield, which wasn’t just a record shop: you could buy fucking fires, fans, mixers and it was an electrical goods shop too. But he also had a little corner of the shop where he sold records. I started reading about music too in Smash Hits magazine, and then graduated to Melody Maker, Sounds, NME, and listening to John Peel. I listened to him on the radio pretty much every night and that really was my musical education. Weirdly, a man four years my senior was doing exactly the same thing in the Windsor area… though Andrew and I only met in 1990 or thereabouts.
But anyway, when I heard this it was like a transmission from not even another planet, but from another dimension, and I just could not believe it. But also I couldn’t acquire it either, because this wasn’t the sort of thing that you could buy in Grinstead’s in Driffield or even Sydney Scarborough in Hull. I don’t even know if I caught the name of it at the time. But then I moved to London in 1988 and I started seeing this woman called Julie Barber, who worked for the NME. She had an incredible record collection. So I would rifle through her records as she had loads and loads of stuff. Then one day I pulled this out and said, ‘Julie, what’s this?’ And she said ‘No, you must know that one?’ I said, ‘No, play it.’ She played it and I just went, ‘Oh my God, it’s this fucking record that I’ve been after for years.’ So if you want a blueprint for A Love From Outer Space, that’s it. It’s got everything from weird, shamanic chanting to a slow arpeggios and fucking ridiculous drums on it too. If I want to distil down what we’ve been doing for nearly 15 years, well, this is the first track I must choose.
