11. The CrampsSongs The Lord Taught Us
This was just a gateway record for everything else. When they started bringing out the Songs The Cramps Taught Us compilations, that just totally echoed what I’d been going through. It’s like there’s an actual story behind this record and it was more than just like "they just wrote these songs", there’s the whole family tree that goes back which is something that I’m really interested in. All people will have this formative experience with a record and I think that one brought the Horrors together and inspired me to just dig deeper, and keep on digging deeper into the history of the music. And it’s such a treat when you find a record and you’re just like, "Oh shit, that’s what J Dilla sampled on a track off Donuts", or a song like ‘Sunglasses After Dark’ – although that’s actually a cover, and it’s totally different, it’s a totally different appeal – and I think that was really important to me. When you’re a band and you’re just starting out making music it actually makes it a little bit easier to know that all these great bands started off by pinching little bits from here and there. It takes the pressure off and there’s the aesthetic and I think it’s such a good place to start. It’s something that I find less exciting now, but I think at the time it just opened my eyes up. Basically it just got me into this whole world that I didn’t know existed and it just opened my ears up to an aesthetic and an attitude that I hadn’t heard before. And you hear all these stories about how Lux Interior put all his records in a box and then in a bomb shelter so that whatever happened his records would always be fine.
Just as The Cramps were a gateway band for you, The Horrors in many ways have been for me, so it’s interesting to trace that lineage.
I think people are just naturally curious and once you become aware that there is something else out there, that becomes very inviting as something to like, get stuck in to. It’s really inspiring and it keeps driving you forward anyway because eventually you find something you really love and it’s always going to lead on to something else. I genuinely feel that music is a large tapestry that is joined by all these dots, and if you can traverse those lines it’s a great thing. Too many people get defined, especially creatively; they kind of pre-define what they’re doing. They’re like, "I want to do a band that’s like this" and they end up keeping themselves in this box. Whereas if, like The Cramps were doing, you join up the dots then I think you kind of dance on the dots, you know what I mean? You’re free to explore and re-appropriate and rework and I think that’s happening much more now because of the internet and it’s just so much easier to penetrate, and I think it’s going to lead on to all this new, really interesting music, because people aren’t closed off anymore. And if you want to get into it you can just get into it quickly.
