Chilly Gonzales's Favourite Albums

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"I have an older brother and an older sister, so like many people, my taste was kind of shaped by what they like, but I guess Frankie Goes To Hollywood was the first real music of my own. I think it really had to do with the super-villainous personality of Holly Johnson, even more than the music; this guy seemed like he was getting revenge by being a pop star. And to some extent, it inspired me that there was so much mischievous energy in what he was doing, and he took negativity and turned it into something positive.

Later on, when I got into rap music, I thought Holly Johnson was an anti-precursor to rappers, in what he was bringing to the table - the maniacal laughing [laughs, maniacally], “ha ha ha, the world is my oyster, ha ha ha!” He really was literally like a super-villain, just laughing at them and having pulled one over on everybody, so I think that's what I connected to right off the bat."

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"I think there's only maybe two songs which have the Revolution on them, and the rest of them is Prince programming a lot of the drums and playing all the parts himself. It's just such a singular vision, you just hear one creative genius doing everything and I think that leads to a certain style of music-making that... all my production work was kind of based on that idea that you have the arrangement in your head before you start and if there's one person doing it, then there's much less chance of each musician trying to get their own ego in edgeways.

When you have a band, the drummer, he's trying to do his thing and show he's a good drummer; you have the guitarist trying to get in his little guitar fills, etc, etc - even the bongo player in Santana is like working overtime so you'll think he's a great bongo player. When Prince is playing everything himself, he just wants the whole thing to be perfect. From what I understand of how Prince works, he just takes a lot of one take after another and doesn't even listen back. He plants things when he plays the drum track that he'll catch later on, so only he knows the secret of what's going on as he puts the song together and I think that leads to a lot of counterintuitive stuff that you hear on that album - strange drum fills that come in in strange parts of the song. The arrangements are really counterintuitive on that album. He gets really addictive: the choruses don't come in screaming at you with tons of extra baggage all of a sudden."

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"I guess Prince led me to Stevie Wonder; I was into him first, around age 14, 15, and then that slowly led me to Stevie Wonder. Like many musicians, you love funk music, you love the idea of the perfect groove, but it was never just enough for me, I could never just listen to The Gap Band or Kool & The Gang really with a straight face. With Stevie Wonder, there's the European aspect, the Mozart aspect, that Prince also has, and that comes from the overarching vision: the groove is there, in the end, to support music-based songwriting, which is to say not lyric-based songwriting. Both Stevie Wonder and Prince are hit-and-miss as far as lyrics are concerned - when they have good lyrics, it's like an accident.

There's something about Fullingness' First Finale that seems to be the darkest [of Wonder's classic albums]. I love that song 'They Won't Go When I Go', that's probably my favourite track on there. It's the most neo-classical album; I think it's the one where he really got into the experimentation with the synthesisers the most and it's got that crazy title, that crazy alliteration."

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"Up until that time, classical music represented to me, like for many people, pretty poncy stuff - Mozart, Beethoven, all that just couldn't speak to me. In my devouring-music phase of being a teenager, Prokofiev essentially was the first thing that was complicated enough and reminded me of what I liked in jazz music and had the sort of dramatic sweep of what I liked in pop music.

I really know them note-for-note, I still listen to them a lot, especially those performances, to the point where, if I hear a different performance of those concertos, it's totally shocking and reminds me of the whole idea of what a classical performance is. I somehow got hooked on that one - I bought them on iTunes recently, and even seeing the cover there brought back a lot of memories, I mean I really wore that one out! He pulled off this magic trick, where he made something very subversive and avantgarde, and, at the same time, very listenable - that's a really hard thing to quantify. He just wanted to connect more with people than the other composers did. He's basically the more hip version of Tchaikovsky, who's a very entertainment, catchy-oriented composer, who had a lot of hits, so to speak, but of course a little bit cheesy to our ears now, and we know those songs so well.

I think sometimes what separates the artists I like from the very similar artists is that one of them needs to connect with the audience and will just go that bit further to think from the perspective of a non-specialised listener. And it's something I try to do with my music as well - I'm a real student of music and harmony and what can be done with it, but that's all overwritten by the fact that I need to try to please people to at least show them something that they wanted that they didn't know they wanted. That's [what separates] the true entertainer from the artist, who's just happy to please himself. "

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"What's funny is that Glenn Gould avoided a lot of crowd-pleasing material, he avoided everything from Beethoven through to the Impressionists, so a pretty big chunk of what all piano players would play and he focussed on extreme modern stuff - he was a real champion of Schoenberg and the beginning of what I call 'unlistenable music'. So what's interesting is that he has this Brahms album, which is kind of an eyesore in his catalogue. He hardly played anything from that period and that composer, and in turns out that he made that record in his house on his own piano, and he essentially did it for a woman that he was in love with. I think it's interesting that when it came time to get laid, Glenn Gould all of a sudden found reserves to do a certain kind of thing that he wasn't able to do when he was just staying in his ivory tower.

I bought this music when I was 14 or 15 pretty much to find my place in society, aka get laid, you know? As with most musicians I know, it's a way to get across - not just to get girls or get guys - it's to fit in or to protect yourself. This album is very much, once Glenn Gould has passed up intellectualising reasons why he won't do certain things, in the end, when he wanted to impress a woman, he was able to make an extremely intimate album, on which he takes a lot of liberties and really lets his hair down - what little hair he had left."

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"I got into hip hop when everyone else really did, around the classic 90s golden age. That was when I started to see the capitalist revenge fantasy at work and I just liked the idea of how fast it moved and the competitive aspect - needing to push it forward faster than others styles of music, and the way there’s was always someone trying do something more avantgarde with the beats and more and more detailed with the approach to words, so I just followed it a bit more like I used to read comic books.

I don't listen to those same albums now, I can't listen to old hip hop honestly - I can only listen to new stuff, so Teflon Don, a fairly recent album, I put that in here. I don't listen to much Teflon Don now, because of course Rick Ross has a million mixtapes and one great solo album since then, but that's a starting point for people who fell off hip hop, who say they don't like it anymore because it is too materialistic or maybe preferred it in its overtly political phase. I think that Teflon Don is an extremely political album, it's just that that aspect has been rendered much more subtle.

I always think we get the rap we deserve and we live in a certain era compared to what that era was and we get the rap that was meant for today, so I think that if people don't like the rap of today, they don't like today. I want to be a man of my time, that's why I instantly was attracted to rap, the only new kind of music I think that's really worth listening to."

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"This album itself I literally wore out the vinyl of it over the years and it's just - it's that perfect sweet spot between that austere European approach and the approach to jazz playing that isn't about masturbation. She has some of the greatest jazz musicians playing with her - Ron Carter is the bass player, who is Miles Davis's bass player, but she's playing the piano, but of course she's a singer, so the piano playing is never doing anything but serving the song. It has the European way of treating the song as the most important part, the actual melody and the feeling put into it, so for me it's the ultimate of classical and jazz approaches without any of the deadweight in that, in that it's a pop album, so you don't have any of the 12 minute-long movements and any of the impossible-to-follow developments of classical music which don't work anymore in the 21st century.

For me - and Nina Simone had it too - it's exactly the sweet spot that I'm going for on my piano records, and even on my records with Boys Noize, I go for the approach of never letting the virtuosity get in the way and always realising that we live in the pop era. The song should be no longer than three or four minutes, because that's easier to follow, and that's the times we live in and that's the music I love, the stuff that was easy to get into but then gives you more as you listen to it

I think there's a certain respect I have for what this generation needs, because I'm part of it. That's why my sense of humour is so important, it sort of connects me to today and my sense of all of it as pop music and that all of it should be pop music. Every bar of Solo Piano, I secretly wish it could be something that Drake is going to want to sample, and I'm lucky enough that he did sample something off Solo Piano. In the back of my mind, I'm thinking, how is this going to sound to a hip-hop fan? How is this going to sound to an underground hipster? I'm not thinking of impressing classical people or jazz people, because I don't respect them - they're stuck in a defensive pose trying to preserve something, but secretly they just feel rejected by the audience: their music is dying and it's their fault, so that's not who I'm picturing - I'm picturing the hot girls I see in my audience!"

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"They influenced me in that these were middle-class Jewish guys coming and rapping. I already appreciated them, but what really clinched it was that they started to play instruments and all of a sudden there was a connection made for me. Mike Diamond was playing the drums, Ad-Rock was playing the guitar and MCA, rest in peace, was playing the bass and they were able to bridge their music fanboy nature together with being fanboys of rap, and all of that just crystallised it for me. It just literally was an inspiration.

I didn't rap on an album until quite a while later than this. I didn't hear it until I moved to Europe, and then I had the luxury of not being in a cultural world that was going to judge me too much for being a rapper, coming from the background I come from. I don't think I could have done that if I stayed in North America, because the cultural impact of being a rapper is just too great there. So it took me going to Europe to actually do it, but I think the idea had been brewing since the Beastie Boys.

I hear bits of the album now, and of course when MCA died, there was a bit more, you started seeing the videos again, and I have to admit it looked pretty dated, much more than I thought it would. Like I said - rap moves fast, so what the Beastie Boys have done recently, they haven't really kept up with it. It's not necessarily an album that I listen to anymore, but, for the time, it was just a huge, massive influence and a crazy ‘a-ha!’ moment."

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"Similar to Frankie Goes To Hollywood, there was something so superior about Morrissey. It was some of the first music where musically I had nothing to really find to really like in it: it's pretty square. Really the attraction was Morrissey and this vengeful nature of his intelligence, similar to what Holly Johnson had - you can see that in the 80s, all my tastes were to the megalomaniac. Now I see Morrissey, he's much more of a melancholy melgalmonaic, but nothing captures teenage alienation quite like Morrissey. I think there's a certain reaction to depression that Morrissey really codified: everybody turns depression into something else, and you can trace that back to Morrissey. A song like 'The Grudge' off Ivory Tower - you cannot get that without Morrissey.

It seemed like British music was more reflective and wore its intelligence - intelligence leading to cynicism and humour - on its sleeve a lot more than so-called earnestness, which I find always more manufactured. I found that with these larger-than-life characters like Holly Johnson and Morrissey and Heaven 17, there was more truth in that than someone who's pretending to be real. You look at the album cover for Penthouse and Pavement - it had so much of the supervillain. They're already referring to themselves as a ‘corporation’ and asking really important questions about what it is to be a musician and the idea of entertainment versus art.

Morrissey, to my mind, is not that far from a rapper - the beginning of 'How Soon Is Now' - 'I am the son, the heir...', the way he uses these puns and the way that they cut so deep, really reminds me of how a rapper uses humour and that humour is always masking something deep, even in a Lil' Wayne punchline. You British guys, whether it was a fact of being dandies or gay, whatever it was, in the mix of these British artists that I liked, I think it was that they were the rappers of their time for me."

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"This probably has more to do with the composer than the performer in that Scarlatti, he's the catchy, crowd-pleasing version of Bach. He comes from the rococo period of classical music, which is post-baroque, pre-classical, and it's a brief period where composers wanted to be entertainers - especially in Italy, they have a little bit more of a crowd-pleasing style. I mostly put this on there because it's a great entree for people who don't like a lot of classical music. Scarlatti's stuff, especially the stuff that's in a minor key, it really bears out listening, it's got a great playful quality. It was written on a harpsichord, but Horowitz plays it on a piano and it’s just something that's been with me on every format imaginable - it's on my phone now, it's what I'm listening to when I'm waiting in line at customs. There's something about it that really calms me the fuck down."

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"I remember someone telling me “this guy, he just improvises for an hour and it's the most amazing thing”. He's the exception that proves the rule - I think if anyone goes on stage and improvises for an hour, then they're inherently awful - it's too risky and it doesn't respect people that pay money to basically say you're going to fight your way out of a paper bag in front of them. I could never do that - it goes against my entertainment instincts. But of course Keith Jarrett: every rule has its exception. It just is really sublime. He's done other live concerts and released them, but none of them quite hold a candle to it. He just was truly inspired - in a way Keith Jarrett goes against so much of what I believe of improvising and of being an extremely suffering artist and being a diva: the guy won't play if there's a draught. If the piano seat doesn't go down far enough, he's cancelling the whole thing! He makes no effort to be easy, but once in a while someone comes along and they can get away with that. It's nice to know that every once in a while even my rules can be broken by someone."

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"I think what Eminem brought to the game was extreme self-awarenss. In a way, he's like the anti-R Kelly. He did the kind of pre-emptive, Andy Kaufman approach. What Andy Kaufman did in his comedy performances was that he'd always be one step ahead of what the audience could be thinking about him and be so incredibly intelligent as to let the audience know what they're thinking about him as they're thinking it. Of course, Eminem, being the first white rapper to do it in a way - he had to be in a very special position. He's like President Obama, he has to be twice as good and half as black, and in Eminem's case, he had to be twice as good and half as white. He did that, I think, by being so incredibly aware, so there was no chance to really ridicule him, because anything you could have said about him - he is everything we say he is. He has that Andy Kaufman level of what I would call the conceptual mastery of the perception of what he was doing, and that was just incredibly inspiring. It's an incredible album musically and lyrically, and that's why he owned the whole decade - up until Kanye West there wasn't really a rapper who really defined the time [like him]."

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"I could have put Nate Dogg down here, but R Kelly has gone further: Nate Dogg also had that quality to me, to have that ridiculousness of embracing that contradiction between being religious and 'I Believe I Can Fly' and all these very saccharine-sounding things combined with the sweetest interpretation of the most gangster bravado ever. ‘Ignition Remix’, of course, is just such an incredible classic, it's one of the greatest songs of all time.

Trapped In The Closet isn't technically an album, otherwise I could have put that on there too. If we're talking about being openly delusional, Kelly really cemented his reputation as the Ed Wood of r'n'b in that moment, and that's very touching - it's very touching when someone goes so far into something and loses complete self-awareness. That's why we love the characters that Ricky Gervais plays, that's why we love David Brent, because he has zero self-awareness, and R Kelly has zero self-awareness, which is why we love him - we just want to give him a hug.

For better for worse, I probably have a little more self-awareness than that - I probably couldn't quite go into the same level of openly delusional. I have a fair bit of it - on The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales there's a part where, if Rick Ross thinks he's big meech, maybe on that album, I think I'm Rick Ross, you know? If I had the insane amounts of money that R Kelly has, then maybe I would make something with that level of high production value, but if you scour YouTube for some of my videos, probably some of them aren't too far from that. But let's not forget that R Kelly is a musical genius and is the closest thing to the Prince of our times, in terms of pure prolific... he is music, in the way that Stevie Wonder is music, and music just drips out of these guys. "