introduction

I'm lucky enough to have gotten into music at the precise moment - punk's immediate aftermath - when it was generally believed that "the way forward" for rock involved borrowing ideas from dance music. "Lucky" in that I arrived too late to get brainwashed by the "disco sucks" worldview. My first albums were all postpunk forays into funk and dub terrain: Public Image Limited's Metal Box, the Slits' Cut, the Talking Heads' Remain in Light. Any mercifully brief fantasies of playing in a band involved being a bassist, like Jah Wobble; I learned to play air guitar only much later.