Mark Bell

In 1990, when the LFO album came out, I was very excited - this is when I would meet up with Mark Bell & Graham Massey in Manchester. After this, me and Mark would stay in touch and have occasional nerd phone calls where we would play each other impossible stuff to find - labels, over the phone and have a freeform about how to fuck up the human voice and use certain effect units and that sort of stuff.

Mark did some remixes for me on the Post album and later in 1996, I asked Mark to come to Spain to experiment with me for the beginning of Homogenic. He said he would come for a couple of weeks but stayed for six months, and we’ve since worked together for four years. We completed each other’s ideas like this for years.

I guess what is kinda exciting about Homogenic and Mark Bell for me, is when we did the tour, Mark did the tour with me along with the Icelandic String Quartet, so it was the first time since the Sugarcubes that the same people that played on the album played live with me. I felt very good about that. It wasn’t like a collection of session musicians - it was people that I had actually written the stuff with. Mark had obviously written some of the stuff he was doing, so it could change through the tour and he could make it even more his. From that you have this feeling when you go on stage that anything could happen - the plant is still growing it isn’t complete. So that was gorgeous.

David Toop Interview, 2002