11. Factory Floor
This takes me back to the warehouse again, and The Quietus, and Factory Floor…it was a great time for me, 2009, 2010, of discovering new things.
I went to see a gig that Factory Floor were playing. I couldn’t see anything in the back, and I just heard this sound. It was just like wow – Nik Void was hitting the guitar with a bow, there was feedback, really powerful, this one light on her and nobody else. It seemed like no-one was really putting any artistry into records at that time, and I thought that everything about this was just amazing, and pointed the way forward I think, for how to make interesting records.
There’s a guy called Paul Smith who managed Factory Floor, and he sent a copy of this record to Stephen Morris and just addressed it to Stephen From New Order, Macclesfield, and it got to him, and he fell in love with them, like I did, and wanted to work with them. He did some remixes, and Chris Carter did as well, and that kind of brought two worlds together for me.
I was going through a kind of creative surge, because I moved back to being with creative people. I wrote a country record at that warehouse, while industrial music was being played and made [laughs]…if you’re looking for a way into writing music on an acoustic guitar, it’s good to have noise in the background. It’s kind of too pretty on its own, and if you’re just sitting with a guitar, you’re automatically self-conscious about the first note you’re going to hit, or the first lyric you’re going to be embarrassed about when you actually write it down, so it’s good to have noise in the background to take your mind away from all of that, and then good stuff comes out. It’s good to be elsewhere, in another world.
