He played at the London Docklands in 1988, I was 14 or 15 and it was my first gig. I knew who he was because I was into synths, but didn’t really know what I was going to be seeing. If you’re a kid, the first gig you see is always going to have an effect, it would have been the same if it had been the Sex Pistols, but that was what it was for me. I’ve never been concerned with what’s cool and what’s not. If I like it artistically and find it interesting, I couldn’t give a fuck whether it’s in or out. I was watching him and thinking, ‘how does he make those sounds?’ and that started me off on a quest which led to Oxygène, which I still think is an extraordinary album.
He recorded this in 1975 and the crazy thing is that the technology wasn’t really there to do what the album did. It’s impressive on so many levels, and sounds like something that should have been made two or three years later, and when you look closely and see what instruments he used it’s the most lo-fi shit ever. The main instrument is just a home organ put through cheap guitar effects pedals in his kitchen. I was lucky enough to go and talk to him [for a 2018 podcast series] and he was the sweetest guy. He talked me through it and said he had had no expectations. I don’t even know if his label understood what it was when he first presented it to them. He was showing me how he recorded it, saying, ‘It’s just this organ going through these effects pedals, and these are the two I actually used back then.’ He could see my face going ‘Fuck!’ and then a week or so later he sent me one in the post, which I’ve used on my albums. It’s on the back of the album cover [of Heard Noises].
