Texas

It's good to see.

Travis or Texas? Travis.

Texas were before our time, for sure.

Decent, pretty good, pretty good.

Travis or Simple Minds? Travis.

What? There's not just that, there's a Queen tour of one of the studios there.

Yeah, Texas I just got, and that's it.

Is it the Queen, is it the Freddie Mercury statue? Live on the pod.

Yeah, I got that as well.

And looking back now, Dave, how much of Juniper's eventual problems were creative, and how much were personality and ambition?

Um, well, Damian decided about a week or two before we were due to go to south of France with Texas and Manic, Manic Street Preachers producer, Mike Hedges.

We were, uh, about two weeks before going to record an album, he decided, "This is not for me." We're all like, "What?" And it just, it was like a bomb going off in the middle of the management, the record company, the five of us, you know? Um, and an awful lot of people at the time, and since, have said, "God, you must've been so pissed off." And I was actually like, do you know what? I, I was only ever disappointed, but I was more like, holy shitballs.

That takes some commitment on Damian's part to throw a b- a bomb in the middle of all of that based purely on what it is he does and doesn't want to do.

And I remember listening to Tracy Chapman with my dad, going on, going over like the Hammersmith flyover and, and kind of being like, "I can't believe this is a woman's voice." Like, it was just so very incredibly powerful.

I was also really obsessed with Texas when I was a kid.

Hm.

We had Texas on.

And now I'm friends with Sharleen Spiteri, which is really cool.

Amazing.

Yes, don't say I don't serve up the best music on Sunday afternoons.

Of course, it was Texas.

They're from Glasgow, and Simple Minds, of course, also Scottish.

Personally, prefer the Irish myself, but hey.

I think Steve Christian with his brilliant musicianship and the fact that he understood jazz and classical meant that I could take to him bizarre bits of music and he'd go, "No, that doesn't work, Mark," you know, and then he'd time-stretch what I was going for to meet the vocal.

Sometimes in the case of a Texas remix, he time-stretched the vocal down and the music I'd sampled up.

So it was like scientifically meeting in the middle to make it work musically.

So really we were on our own, um, our own trip really.

Because I'd be s- sitting running sets for an hour, two hour, three hours, and in that I might start off with reggae, then go to hip hop, then go to mid-beat, Crucial and Dorfmeister with a bit of, um, you know, Port recordings, um, out of, uh, Fila Brasilia, mid-tempo stuff, then ending up going towards house, then a bit of drum and bass, then back down.

See what I mean? It's like it's all over the place.

And when you do that, you're like, "I know what it is to entertain a crowd, so can I do that on vinyl and make it a listenable experience?" So Northern Sulfuric Soul came after the Tony D album, and I'd cut my teeth then as an A&R man, and also I was like, "We're ready to do this now." The remixes by Rayne Christian were Nightmares on Wax, The Far Side, Texas.

I'm like, "Look, we're cutting our teeth.

Simple Minds closed it on the Sunday.

Texas.

I even went into the DJ tent for Joe Wiley and Romesh Ranganathan.

and i didn't think we'd even go near the dj tent but there was a couple acts that we didn't really we didn't really care that much about so we thought we'll just go check it out and as soon as i walked into the dj tent they were playing behemian rhapsody um and the whole tent was just singing it at the top of their lungs i was singing at the top of my lungs like It was just absolutely brilliant and I drove there and I drove back as well.