Graham Massey

I’d got the their album ( 808 State) in 1990. I hadn’t heard that much foreign bands so when the Sugarcubes started travelling in ’88, I was like dying, and I’d go to concerts in Camden and walk in there and my first shock was like, it’s crap, there’s nothing creative here, because I’d built it up in my head.

And then I ended up going to a club, and saw that energy at that time,’88, there. If you went to clubs enough and waited ’til five or six in the morning, there would eventually come up a live DJ, and you would hear music you’d never heard before, ever. And obviously, 808 State,
because they just had that sort of that intellectual rhythm. I’ve always been really into rhythms. It wasn’t just like a "doof-doof-doof" ; it was very vibrant and they were physical, probably one of the few very physical English bands at that time. So I went to visit him and found we’d got a very similar record collection.

The person that was definitely something so creative was Graham, and we were making each other tapes, back and forth, and we wrote two songs together, and we were talking about a lot of stuff. And I guess the people I met, and I just met on the club scene, Nellee Hooper, who had
done Soul II Soul, which I didn’t know anything about, because it was too fashionable to get over to Iceland. It was sort of the era of Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys.

I think in Iceland people go more for rough stuff. And also the whole black thing is something we don’t really understand in Iceland. It was very interesting ; we’d talk a lot. In a certain way, me and Graham were too similar, we kind of agreed on everything.

The Times, 2 august 2001