BARON OF BOTTOM END

What music are you currently grooving to? Arvo Pärt, Harold Budd and a bit of Mozart this last few weeks. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Miles Davis, Dark Magus. Electric period Miles was a huge influence on me. It’s akin to the great abstract expressionist painters. Very uncompromising. I first heard Dark Magus not long after we finished recording Metal Box, with PiL. I could immediately see a strong connection there. What was the first record ever you bought? And where did you buy it? My mum used to buy me a single every Friday from Paul’s record stall on Whitechapel Waste, just outside Whitechapel station. The first was Jim Reeves, Welcome To My World. The first record I bought would have been ska, or blue beat as we called it. Liquidator, something like that.

Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? Somehow right from the beginning I knew that you are stuck with being yourself.

What do you sing in the shower? I sing football song refrains, but I change the lyrics to fit my Staffie, Tyson. So instead of singing ‘We do what we want, we’re Tottenham Hotspur, we do what we want,’ I sing ‘He does what he wants, my Tyson, he does what he wants.’ I have a shower room I use after I have been running with him, I shower him first and then I shower, singing all the time.

What is your favourite Saturday night record? On a Saturday night I am either gigging or watching Nordic noirs with my Mrs. The renaissance of TV that started out via Oz is the new rock’n’roll. It is top of the arts now, whereas in the past of course TV was at the bottom of the list of credible hip art forms. Music is now bottom, even below cooking!

And your Sunday morning record? Easy, The Commodores.