13. DJ Shadow – Entroducing

When sampling came along, I was really paranoid. I thought, ‘I can see where this is going’. I hadn’t been worried about drum machines, but I thought sampling was a bridge too far – get to the musicians union!

But Entroducing is the full fulfulment of everything where I thought sampling could go, and it’s brilliant. It’s the direction that I think New Order should, or could, have gone down. We never discussed anything – when you’re in a band and it’s working, you don’t need to discuss it – but it would have been interesting to do it. It would never have ended up sounding anything like DJ Shadow, because it’s just brilliant. I’ve got a 3CD set of his early mix tapes and it’s got a lot of imagination about what goes with what, and how things fit together. That wouldn’t happen if I tried to do it. I did try it once; I stuck together something like Blue Oyster Cult and Bruce Springsteen together because they both started with B’s. It didn’t go very well. This was years before DJ Shadow, and I thought, ‘I’ll experiment’. I tried inventing the mash up, and it went badly.