Changing tracks: Jim Sclavunos

Published on Saturday 23 August 2008 10:20

SISTER RAY The Velvet Underground

I was about 12 years old when I first heard this song. I used to have a little transistor radio that I'd listen to underneath the blankets, so my parents couldn't hear that I was still awake late at night. I fell asleep one night and awoke to this song. The music was a mindblowing revelation to a pre-pubescent boy living in Flatbush. Unbelievably, I found a vinyl copy of the album in the library of my Catholic school; it had never been checked out. I decided it was destined to be mine and committed one of my first acts of petty thievery.

I WANNA BE YOUR DOG

The Stooges

Quite by chance I discovered this on a college station with a really weak signal at the butt end of the radio dial, broadcasting out of East Orange, New Jersey, called WFMU. This was the first song I ever tried to sing in my own teenage punk band, Mimi and the Dreamboats.

FRANKENSTEIN

The New York Dolls

Puberty can be very awkward, especially if you're a 6ft 6ins bisexual with effeminate mannerisms living in a conservative Italian neighbourhood. The Dolls helped me get through it. Their outlandishness gave me confidence in my own attempts at sexual self-expression. The anarchic energy of their music gave me hope for my own fledgling efforts.

NEAT, NEAT, NEAT

The Damned

The first UK punk song I heard from the first English punk band I saw at CBGB's. I threw a pie at Captain Sensible that night; he got me back 20 years later with a banana in the face.

MY FAVORITE THINGS

John Coltrane

The first avant-garde jazz piece I was exposed to. I only recently realised Coltrane recorded it for the first time on my fourth birthday. I didn't hear it until several years later, but up until then jazz for me was boring, unsexy, incomprehensible music for old people. Somehow John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones blew open my ears to limitless vistas of musical expression with the most unlikely of tunes.

• Grinderman play Hydro Connect Music Festival at Inveraray Castle, Argyll, Saturday

• www.connectmusicfestival.com