2. David BowieDavid Live

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So I get pegged as a big Bowie fan all the time, which drives my wife [actor/producer Elaine Collins] bananas, because she got to Bowie first. She’s still got scrapbooks in the attic from when she was at school. All these photographs of David from Jackie magazine, from the very beginning.  Whereas I’d had flirtations. I wasn’t one of those people who saw ‘Starman’ on Top Of The Pops, but a few years after, at school, when the teachers would occasionally let kids play the records in a lesson, if you were drawing or something like that, somebody played Aladdin Sane. And of course, we, being teenagers, played ‘Time’ over and over again, because of the famous line in it referring to self-pleasuring. What? It was amazing! We couldn’t believe anybody was actually saying that.

But I never really got into Bowie until I was at art school, which would have been about 1976 or 77. The first album I really bought was Station To Station, which I thought was terrific, but I couldn’t understand what it was. It didn’t feel like glam rock, or soul, or Kraftwerk, but it was individual, epic, and strange. So then I thought, Oh, well, I love Bowie now, so I’d better find out more, so this being a time when you had to buy or borrow records to do that, I went to a record shop and saw David Live.

I thought it was a greatest hits album, which would save me a bit of money, but when I got home and listened to it, of course, I soon discovered it wasn’t that at all. I love its strung-out anxiety. It’s a live album [from the Diamond Dogs tour] full of panic, on which the versions of his songs are very, very different. His voice is hoarse, almost broken, because he’s been touring for weeks, but it still has this absolute authority. And I love the way the musicians sound… apparently there’d been a terrible argument before everybody went on stage about the deal they were being paid, so they’re very disgruntled, but there’s this epic urgency to it. And Earl Slick, who’s only 22, has only just been parachuted in to replace Mick Ronson. He’s just fearless here, given that those are big, stacked heels to fill. He attacks every single song with this wild animal.