Klaus Schulze
“Klaus Schulze has been a big influence on my life and writing, not just in the prog world but also dance and ambient, which is linked into a lot of prog these days. He started as the drummer in Tangerine Dream, and then with Manuel Göttsching founded Ash Ra Tempel, who influenced the whole psychedelic prog world massively.
“Also, throughout his career he has moved with the technology, sometimes successfully and at other times not so. During his analogue period in the 70s he really pushed the boundaries with what was possible with the noises, the pulses and the rhythms and taking them into the ambient side of things. He covered a broad spectrum of sound, moving around in all sorts of projects.
“He also dabbled in digital for a while when it appeared, as did everybody, in the 80s, which I don’t think was necessarily so great. But in his use of the Moog you could hear the soundscapes that were possible, as on his The Dark Side Of The Moog albums.
“I’m a big Wagner nut and so is he. In fact he’s used an alias, Wahnfried – which was the home Wagner built in Bayreuth – for a lot of projects. You can hear Wagner in Schulze’s music as well – this was a strange melding of those musical ideas from history with technologies and going into the worlds of prog, ambient and dance. Schulze shows that you can break all these boundaries of what is supposed to be allowed or not in any form of music. “I got into his music quite early.
I saw Tangerine Dream on tour at the Brighton Dome in the early 70s, so I started to explore who they were then – Schulze had already been gone for a few years by that point. Can, NEU! and that whole German scene were big for me in the 70s. I had lots of influences from that period.
“After I left Twelfth Night at the end of the 80s, I took 20 years off popular music and immersed myself in classical music. Around 2000 I suddenly discovered dance had happened and then re-explored it all. Dance and prog people really revered these things from the 70s and 80s that started off the sounds and the rhythms they use today.”