Influences: John Foxx

One beautiful piece of music – effortlessly, minimally, modern. It still resonates, still carries you down some endless European highway in serene velocity.

Neu! made the music that encouraged me to abandon Americanisms, in order to find out what we might sound like if we looked over to Europe instead. I felt that everything in the list below had led up to this point. This was the launchpad and Conny Plank had recorded it.

Popol Vuh made the first choral ambient music, fortuitously obtaining a proto-Germanic version of a mellotron, with some very fine vocal tape loops – and using it all with great sensitivity. This linked right back to Tallis and Palestrina and stimulated the cell division that gave birth to Music for Airports and a stream of music which became known as Ambient, some time later.

Blew my tiny mind when I first saw it. Always loved that angular New York/ European Jazz the two Bernsteins ripped out – and Elmer’s, combined with Saul Bass’s supremely confident imagery, creates this slow burn, a fierce, intelligent elegance of style and cool. Impossible to better.

Punk happened early in Germany, while we’d gone all decadent, obliviously wallowing in Prog. This is the polar opposite of Walk On The Wild Side – unfettered, inelegant, imprecise, but a creature of formidable sonic power and howling beauty – the sound of a country remaking itself from the ruins. Fabulous poetry in the title and Renate’s voice is donating genetic material to Polystyrene, Lydon and Kate Bush . The last few climactic moments of the piece also hold a promise that could still be distilled into something entirely new.

Quaint and ultra-modern at the same moment – as well as strangely moving. Of course, this plangent singing machine represents endless terminal retrofutures – but what could be more genuinely futuristic than an instrument that senses proximity? Something here is waiting to be properly explored and still has great, unrealised potential.

A disorientating slab of post-rock noise and power, a remodelling of instrumentation, vocal conventions and mannerisms into art noise. It’s a platform for the next stage of sonic exploration and deconstruction – via recording studios and extreme treatments of voice, reconsideration of instrument hierarchy and an acid bath of distortion.

The way all art used to be – Beauty attained through order, discipline and the joyous pursuit of intelligent adventure – here involving the human voice, sonic purity and the responses of architecture. Tallis was a British genius, a contemporary of Shakespeare and his music easily stands right next to the might of a younger Palestrina in Rome at that time.

Look at Townsend from about seven minutes in. This is what he invented and pursued – a gloriously adventurous, courageous piece of sonic and physical mayhem. And it’s the British side of the coin. Townsend’s inspired combination of modernism, Pop Art, violence and feedback, entered the DNA of almost every ensuing band – from the Velvets in New York, over to many of the above German musicians, who were poised to incorporate these elements into their own new forms, ideas and expediencies.

Sadly, shortly after this point, the real adventure moved over to Europe, because we Brits had got stuck in our comfy wee bog of Prog and HM. And there we remained until the early 1970’s.