4. Roxy MusicFor Your Pleasure

They succumbed to the commercial pressure I guess, but the first five or six Roxy Music albums were hugely experimental for the time – you could probably describe them as precursors to new wave. Songs like ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, or ‘Editions Of You’ or ‘Do The Strand’ – these are songs that changed my understanding of music, and nobody sounded like Roxy Music at the time: it was such a daring style of songwriting, arrangements, instrumentation. I really learnt from these, and again there’s a direct connection to what we later did on Into The Pandemonium and Monotheist, records where we too employed a style and measures that are not traditionally heavy metal-based, and we didn’t accept any limitations. I never got to see them at the time – they toured in Switzerland at the time with Manifesto and I really didn’t like that album so I didn’t go to the concert, which I later regretted. When they reformed I travelled Europe to see them four times, and I also saw them in what was then called the Hammersmith Odeon, so that’s how important Roxy Music is to me.