2. The BeatlesThe White Album
As my mother started her descent in the 1970s she also started to work for a smuggling organisation. I know that sounds like some kind of novel, but it’s actually true. So she smuggled and she would be gone from our home – it was just me and her, and she would be gone for like two or three weeks at a time in South America or Australia. And I was alone as a seven-year-old. She would leave, and she would turn on the radio and say: ‘So you don’t feel alone.’ On radio at the time – unlike today – the music was far more varied, and the radio stations played a lot more rock music than you would hear now. So this was my first discovery of serious music in the world beyond what was in the record collection of my mother. The radio station we listened to was a German radio station and they played Frank Zappa and Santana and so on, and Johnny ‘Guitar; Watson and whatever. So this was an immense education for me while I was sitting there alone as a child.
I discovered The Beatles through my parents record collection, but later on I made them my own – as I became older I realised that especially the second half of The Beatles’ career, where they became hippies and started to create serious rock music, was an endless museum or an endless collection of interesting music – no two songs ever sound alike. Their music was incredibly brave and avant-garde. This is an album that has followed me from basically since I began to think. In my tiny ham-fisted way I’ve been trying to make The Beatles with my own bands over and over again, starting with an album like Into The Pandemonium, by Celtic Frost, where we really literally took the concept of The White Album – trying to do an album that doesn’t accept any borders, any limits. If you listen to to The White Album, there’s everything’s on there from folk to heavy rock, to rock music to avant-garde. Everything’s on there on one album and that always fascinated me. So I’ve tried that again with [Celtic Frost’s] Monotheist and I’ve tried it with the two Triptykon albums. I would never ever see myself in the same way as The Beatles – that would be preposterous – but I’ve tried to do a heavy metal version of The White Album over and over again, and I probably will try that until I die.
