My musical beginnings were as a bedroom punk fanatic aged 12 – 13. I started playing guitar but perceived anything with more than three or four chords as pretentious and overly complicated. This stopped me making progress but strangely enough I think it was formative in instilling in me a sense of valuing only what was absolutely necessary for making impactful music.
My favourite band at this point was The Clash. I also remember buying the first Stooges album on CD from HMV, which permanently and profoundly rewired my brain.
I Wanna Be Your Dog - The Stooges
Bands like Primal Scream and the Happy Mondays eventually opened my mind to electronic (dance) music. Indeed, I'm not alone in thinking that "Screamedelica" was such an important record, not only because its a banging soundtrack for an extraordinary trip into the human mind, but also because it let indie kids (like me) know that it was okay to dance.
Slip Inside This House - Primal Scream
Indeed, a lot of my early forays into recording were influenced by electronic artists like Aphex Twin, who is a total inspiration. I also went through a reasonably intense dub phase, worshipping at the altar of Lee Scratch Perry, which gave me a love of the sound of echoes for their own sake.
You can probably hear the influence of Lee Scratch Perry, The Happy Mondays and suchlike on my old track "Trip Me Down," below:
Here's a track from my favourite Lee Perry dub album:
My first guitar heroes were Mick Jones and Joe Strummer from The Clash, but since then I’ve spent a lot more time worshipping Jimi Hendrix. I learned so much about guitar playing from Purple Haze alone, and words cannot describe how much I’ve loved Axis: Bold as Love. I've also been a disciple of John Frusciante. When I was younger, I was obsessed with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers for a time. Hip readers wince all you like but I have no regrets reading every wise word spoken from the mouth of John Frusciante.
I first came to music with a punk attitude and had very little interest in ‘psychedelia.’ There was no sudden flash of conversion. Instead I underwent a slow awakening over several years. By the time I was sixteen I had transformed from vehemently despising The Beatles to being a victim of acute Beatlemania. "Revolver" was, and still is, one of my favourite albums. I love how it combines pop music with sounds that were avant-garde in its day (drones, sitars, tape loops, reversed guitars etc).
Tomorrow Never Knows - The Beatles
I also slowly got into Syd Barrett and early Pink Floyd. Syd is now my musical high priest. I love his ability to write whimsical, naive sounding songs that also contain darkness and pain, and which conjure up a unique and strange interior world. His free-form guitar playing, as well as the lo-fi sound of his solo albums have also inspired me no end.
I guess its impossible to tell which influences me more - punk or psychedelia. The truth is, both types of music have much in common when they are at their best, seeking to explore the outer reaches of sound and the possibilites of guitar music, either through weird production tricks and exotic instruments, or violent noise and intense speed.
I've always felt pulled in two directions as a guitar player by my love of both classic blues rock and more avant-garde noise. If you give me a guitar, usually the first thing I'll think to play will inevitably be some kind of blues idea.
Here are some of my favourite blues recordings:
See My Jumper Hanging on the Line - R. L Burnside
At the same time, I've always been gripped by a desire to transcend blues-influenced music for something beyond, ever since having my limited ideas of the possibilities of guitar music shattered by hearing My Bloody Valentine, Can, Spacemen 3 and Sonic Youth.
Only Shallow - My Bloody Valentine
I really dig the concept of drones, long sustained notes in music, and the idea of the 'one-chord song.' I have an unrecorded drone song called "Feel Alright" that I've only yet performed once (because the owner of the venue had pissed me off).
“Venus In Furs” by Lou Reed and “We Will Fall” by The Stooges (produced by John Cale, and featuring his viola, too) were my first taste of drone aged thirteen – but it wasn’t until later that I really dug the concept of drone. Inspired by Lou Reed, I developed a drone tuning for guitar (only live audiences have yet heard this). I’ve also been influenced by Indian classical music, which I found out about through The Beatles and Donovan and whoever else.
Venus In Furs - The Velvet Underground
A moment of gnosis on the whole blues vs noise issue came from my friend Rufus Harman. In early 2024, I really dug the first single by Television, "Little Johnny Jewel." What I dug so much about it was how I perceived the lead guitar playing to be so far away from anything resembling blues. Rufus told me immediately upon hearing it that the song was "very bluesy." This diagnosis could only have come from a brain desensitised by listening to the sounds of recorded powerdrills on the bus, or whatever. Either way, it's true. The song has a disticntly bluesy bass, allowing the lead guitar to fly off into uncharted space. Try as you might you cannot escape the blues so easily as a rock musician ... so switch off your mind, relax and float downstream the Mississipi Delta.