6. Dionne WarwickGolden Hits, Volume 1
It’s sort of an uncool thing, but the funny thing is The Slits owned that record collectively. It’s hard to believe but we pulled that record apart. We listened to every instrument. We pulled apart the drum patterns, the very understated chk chk chk’s of the guitar, the sounds of the guitar, the melodies, the structures of the songs. We knew that record inside out. Every single song. And it became the bedrock of our songwriting.
Dionne Warwick is a diva who doesn’t warble about and do acrobatics with her voice, she just tries to tap a vein of truth in a very clean, clear way. There’s no acrobatics, fancying about or showing off in her voice. It’s just about pureness. Which is funny because Ari is all over the place with her voice but she was very influenced by Dionne Warwick, as we all were. And we were influenced by that songwriting and incredibly influenced by that record. It was the basis for all our work. Even though through our incompetence and lack of experience of course it comes out totally different. Which is what’s so great about art. Even if it’s Manet, back in the day, trying to get into the Salon de Refuses. He was trying to be an old master, we were trying to write great, proper songs but filtered through our brains and our lives it came out as The Slits. But we started off with Dionne Warwick and Bacharach and David.
