“My first introduction to music was my family’s record collection. It was like a whole new world opened up, and suddenly I was part of this club.”
“My Dad had a lot of blues records by American artists like B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf, alongside The Rolling Stones, Peter Green, Eric Clapton, and John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers. Wild wild sounds for a young kid from a small village, and I loved it all. My mum had a lot of singer/songwriters in her collection like Bob Dylan, Carole King, Serge Gainsbourg, and Jane Birkin.
And then my aunt and uncle used to play ’50s rock and roll records like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard and Elvis with lots of dancing round the house. And I’ll always remember them playing me Bonnie Raitt and Michelle Shocked for the first time and thinking I want to do that.
I worked in a record shop for a while and discovered so many artists, a lot of dub and reggae, jazz, hip hop, soul and funk, The Cramps, Billie Holiday, Tom Waits—all of my wages went on records. When we are on tour I always try to hunt out the local record shops and have a dig. It’s a love affair that will go on and on.”
—Emma Richardson
“I was a hand me down kid despite being the eldest, never the receiver of the latest must have gadgets. I seemed to get things just as they became obsolete. One of the upsides of this were the old hi-fi separates and records making it out of the living room and into my teenage bedroom.”
“After working out that old records play on both sides, I quickly devoured my Dad’s late ’70s collection. “Spiral Scratch” by the Buzzcocks with Howard Devoto, Q: Are We Not men? A: We Are Devo by Devo, and Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True, all being early influences on me. After that, garages of 45s made it to my deck and a love of The Beatles’ b-sides and Kinks singles were blasting from suburbia for a couple of summers.
When we signed our first record deal we insisted on getting 12 inch physical copies made—it was the tangible version of the whirlwind we now found ourselves in. I keep a copy still in the shrink wrap next to the cassette demos it spawned. We keep all the records in our studio spaces, and we are forever pulling out a random one to get inspired, or just have a dance about if things get too intense.
I normally buy for the cover art, good or bad, and I’m known to buy a job lot of 78s and play them on a very loud gramophone, still rocking the suburbs hopefully.”
—Russell Marsden
Band of Skulls’ cover of the Bob Dylan classic “The Times They Are A-Changin'” is taken from SOTONES10, the all new gatefold double compilation LP celebrating a decade of Sotones Records. SOTONES10 can be preordered here.
