Mark Arm

"I just love that record. I love the early Stranglers. The bass always sounds so good. It just drives everything. It's almost the lead instrument. The Stranglers were such a weird band. They've got this sort of Rick Wakeman-esque classical keyboard going all over the place but sometimes, like on Black And White, it's more synthesiser stuff which is cool. It's got my favourite Stranglers songs on it culminating in the last song 'Enough Time'. I think that's just a brutal and great song. I love 'The Tank', 'Toiler On The Sea', 'Do You Wanna', 'Sweden (All Quiet On The Eastern Front)', 'Outside Tokyo' the whole thing about the watches with a strap to sell is really funny. 'Nice 'N' Sleazy' has a really great groove. The bad pun bugs me a little bit but it's still pretty great. Rattus Norvegicus was a great record too, but No More Heroes, of the first three albums, seems the weakest. Or maybe it's the one I haven't listened to as much. Black and White just feels more brutal than the first two records."

"It's hard for me to choose between The Stooges and Fun House even though they're very different. I probably bought them within weeks of each other in 1980 when I was at college and I loved them both equally, you know? The first record has some of Ron Asheton's greatest guitar leads. The guitar sound is fantastic. It's occasionally got tribal drums which Fun House doesn't have. There's a whole different feel and Iggy's vocals are sort of detached. The Stooges opens up with '1969' and 'I Wanna Be Your Dog', but then there's this mellow thing that lasts nine minutes or something... Oh man! I kind of love 'We Will Fall' for its weirdness We did the Big Day Out in Australia in 1993 and that had us, Iggy, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Beasts Of Bourbon and a few other people on that bill, and we all got on stage to do 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' and had a ball. There's something primal about all of the Stooges. Fun House almost feels like a live set. It's got the show opener 'Down On The Street', it builds up a bit more with another couple of songs and then you flip it over and all of a sudden the saxophone kicks in. The song 'Fun House' in particular is kind of what jazz rock fusion should have been instead of Al Di Meola and shit like that. There's a jazz element but with a totally rocking rhythm section. I suppose I have chosen a lot of records with the sax on, I'm not opposed to the saxophone!"

"I guess it was originally two EPs, put together in one record. I don't have the original versions but the songs all feel like one record and it's kind of them at their catchiest. They were always a little bit creepy. Some of the other things that came out on Ralph Records like Renaldo and The Loaf were wackier but there was a creepiness to The Residents that I found very, very appealing. Do you know Long Gone John, the label boss from Sympathy For The Record Industry? I went down to visit him at his house in Long Beach. This band I was in, Bloodloss, was on tour and we all went over there because he released a couple of our records. We went to his house and he was just a massive collector of crazy rock stuff and also that kind of juxtaposed art, like Robert Williams paintings. The Residents came up and his eyes lit up. He was like, ""Come here, follow me"" and he took us to this back room, opened up a safe and pulled out a copy of Santa Dog their first record. He prized that so much he kept it in a safe!"

"We played with the line-up from this album at 2007's All Tomorrow's Parties. We were allowed to curate a day and we brought them over. That record A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die just got reissued on Superior Viaduct and they played a couple of shows in California. Danny Bland - a guy I knew from way back from the band Cat Butt, works very closely for Dave Alvin from Flesh Eaters [and The Blasters] - asked me if they came to Seattle, would we want to play with them and I was like: "Fuck yeah!" They were great man. They exceeded expectations I think and there were a lot of people at the show who were probably not familiar with the record but were familiar with the guys. They're like "we like The Blasters, we like X" but it's a totally different beast to those bands. It's got more of a Captain Beefheart, early Dr. John feel to it with the marimbas on the record, the Steve Berlin sax (another record with sax!). It was kind of an anomaly at the time. It was part of the punk scene but it wasn't a punk record. There was this thing at the time that I confused it with at first - bands like 45 Grave and Christian Death and the Dance With Me-era TSOL where everything was kind of getting satanic. I initially lumped it in with that stuff but it's so much better and further ahead of the game than that. The record for me was kind of a slow burn. I worked in a radio station and when it came in I put it on a cassette with a more normal hardcore band on the other side. I eventually found myself fast-forwarding through the hardcore side and just listening to A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die over and over again. It wasn't like initially "this is great!", it was more like "this is weird!" to a 19-year-old. Chris Desjardins' lyrics are awesome and dense and intense and pretty much like Nick Cave's. Both those guys - they don't write short, concise pop songs."

"Tales Of Terror were this band from Sacramento. Unfortunately this record hasn't physically been reissued yet. They came through Seattle and played a show. It was random, nobody had heard of them, they hadn't got a record out. It was at an all-ages venue where you'd just go for something to do and this band came on and destroyed the place. And this was probably around '84 so at that point I was kind of looking for other things besides hardcore, which I was much more into a year or two previously. Green River had started at this point and I was trying to do something a bit differently, and this band came out and among the covers they played they did 'Search and Destroy' and 'Spanish Castle Magic' and everyone in the band was just an awesome, crazed musician. The singer would do backflips and land on his feet and by the end of the set all of them except for the drummer were wrapped up in cords. Somehow they all got tangled up and it didn't seem like something pre-planned, it was the natural course of events for that particular show. They were just wild, wild dudes and unfortunately a couple of them are dead now, and one of them is severely debilitated due to too much drugs, which is kind of a bummer. They were the kind of people who were just up for everything and they'd push whatever boundaries and envelopes there were. Supposedly they would carry a blender with them and they'd just put whatever in the blender. They'd go to someone's house, find the alcohol and weird shit from the fridge and put it in and then they'd drink it. I even heard they would put dirt in it. I don't know if that's true, it seems a little over the top. They were a great band that unfortunately only lasted for one record. The only flaw of that record is that it starts off with a cover of 'Hound Dog' but once they kick into their own songs after that it's a fantastic fucking record. It's really super loose. The record seems like you can almost hear them getting drunker and drunker as everything continues. Green River covered one of their songs from that record - a song called 'Ozzie' - we didn't do it nearly as good but... we did it. They were a big influence in our approach to live performance. Unfortunately I don't have the limberness and the wherewithal to do that now. There was one crazy Mudhoney show at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London where everybody tried to fit up on stage."

"Really Red are from Texas and they released Teaching You The Fear in 1981. My friend Smithy and I had a fanzine called Attack and that was one of the records that came through. Our first band Mr. Epp eventually played with them. There's a lot going on in that band for a so-called hardcore punk band. There was a lot of cool stuff coming out of Texas in the early 80s like Big Boys and The Dicks, a little later the Butthole Surfers. Really Red was quite a political band. So many political punk bands were really strident like Crass but in the wake of Maximumrocknroll fanzine many of them were 16-year-old kids spouting shit about stuff they didn't really understand. And who wants to take advice from someone with a very small worldview? Really Red were a little older, maybe five to eight years older than me, and I know this because Ronnie Bond eventually moved up to Seattle and I got to know him a little. Those guys were old enough that when The MC5 came through Houston in the early 70s they hung out with them. Really thoughtful guys but most importantly kick-ass songs. Kelly Younger was a really unique guitar player. They also referenced Nico and The Velvet Underground as well as political punk stuff. They just seemed a little broader than a lot of things that were happening at the time in the hardcore scene in particular."

"Black Unity is one song played live that lasts about 35 minutes and it's free jazz but it has a very deep groove. There's a drummer and a couple of percussionists and the bass player is locked into them. It's almost the jazz version of the Stooges song 'Fun House' if that makes any sense. It's not free in the sense that the drummer's going off, or everyone is going off at once. There's a deep groove but there's also looseness to it too."

"I think one of the main reasons I picked Abattoir Blues and Lyre Of Orpheus was because, as a double album, you get more bang for your buck. Abattoir Blues has a more gospel feel to it, background vocals and big crescendos. Lyre Of Orpheus was generally a quieter record except for the title track, which is one of my favourites. I love the lyrics to that song. One awesome thing about Nick Cave is the darkness and the humour in his stuff. On Abattoir Blues, I love 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World', 'Hiding All Away' and 'Nature Boy'. Just good tunes man. At this point you can hear the Warren Ellis influence. I've always been a Nick Cave fan, since The Birthday Party. My roommate at the time, Charles Peterson [Sub Pop photographer], had a copy of Prayers On Fire and I've been listening to and following Nick Cave ever since then. First time I got to see him he didn't play Seattle, so me and my friends drove three hours north to Vancouver and that was on the First Born Is Dead tour. My favourite ever Nick Cave lyric was going way back to 'Deep In The Woods' [from Mutiny/The Bad Seed] - where it ends with the line, "Tonight we sleep in separate ditches"; that always cracks me up. 20,000 Days On Earth was the best music documentary I've ever seen. It didn't follow the normal " and then he did this and then he did that" of those Behind The Music narratives, it was a surreal and cool peak in to Cave's world. Something I learned about him that I didn't know already is that he likes to eat pizza in front of the TV!"