CATE LE BON

Dada-melodist wonders at Faust’s Faust IV (Virgin, 1973)

Carmarthenshire’s singular talent takes the Last Night A Record Changed My Life challenge: the gateway song was The Sad Skinhead, but what's the LP?

It was driving around North Wales, on the road from Bethesda to Gerlan, when my dear friend, Sion Glyn, put The Sad Skinhead on. I remember it so clearly – we had just negotiated the first of a few tiny roundabouts and then it hit. There is a blurry image of a stone wall and hedge that it is forever linked with the song. It was like hearing a new language, a vocabulary that I did not know I was missing until I knew it existed. I don’t remember feeling the width and tactility of music in that way before then.

When I explored the album as a whole, it didn’t all sound like the song I had fallen so hard for, but therein lies [its] magic and seniority. The first track is an 11 minute-plus jam of distortion and seductive cacophony that’s fixed to a point – like working a spirograph until the paper tears. It was a different planet to the song that had drawn me in, and yet when The Sad Skinhead kicked in right after with an unhinged scream it felt of the same solar system. And then Jennifer – a lusher affair but married to the former in abstract expression. I loved the concrete dry vocal delivery and industrial guitar exclamations over the undulating bass and hypnotic guitar motifs – it was the type of beauty I craved – brutal and exciting. Each song thereon unfolded unexpectedly. It was inspiring me sonically like nothing had ever before.

It is a tapestry and its magic resides in the sum of the whole. It is beautiful, obtuse, ugly, disturbing, traditional, conventional, infectious, unaware, generous, magical… and it is the greatest lesson in making the music you want to make with an unapologetic disregard to the notion of genre.

I come back to this album almost every time I work in a studio, to hear the tone of a guitar, but mostly to remember how a song feels. It is an encyclopedia of reference and an endless well of joy.

Cate Le Bon’s Reward is out on Mexican Summer.