Europhilia:
What kind of records were you playing at the high school parties?
We were playing anything from the Thompson Twins “In the Name of Love” and Answering Machine’s “Call Me Mr. Telephone,” to “Capricorn” by Capricorn. We played that and more Italian music, things like [Doctor’s Cat] “Feel the Drive.”
When we first heard
Manuel Göttsching, we just listened to that shit for hours, man: days and weeks trying to figure out what he was thinking.
[up in Chicago] You paid 15 bucks to get in and you’d hear Frankie Knuckles. He was nothing like he is now. He was unbelievable. He played
Front 242 and he played
Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
The Italian music was also very good: Klein + M.B.O., all the Capricorn stuff. I was the one who brought it back to Detroit. Nobody had it.
I thought Ultravox were very important. There was also a record called “Transdance” from a group called Night Moves. I’m sure to this day it was David Bowie just fuckin’ around on a little bullshit, no-name label. It was like this 808 with a synth line, these chords and just this gaunt sounding haunting vocal. Around the time when the Italian stuff was happening big, it was considered one of those records, even though it was from England. There were a couple of English imports that came along like that. But Italy was where it was at.
We lived off those records for years. See that was one of the biggest problems in Detroit: people played records too long.
There was a period when the Italian thing dried up. That was a bad time and that was when we got really serious about music. It was, I think, right between the point where Italy dried up and Farley and those guys made their first records…