When I went to record my first album, which should have been a punk album, there was a synthesiser in the control room. I'd never seen one before but they let me have a go on it and I loved it to bits.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It was the Control album that was really about what I wanted to do.
More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.
We always started these albums as making demos, that went right on until Scary Monsters.
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.
I didn't develop or build synths. I had my technicians modify them for my live stage performances.
I think I was first to do live performances on a modern electronic sound synthesizer.
I have the utmost respect for synthesizers - Soft Cell, early Depeche Mode. But that's become a cliche for the '80s.
Throughout my years in From First to Last, I was always dabbling and making electronic music on my own time. The first records I ever owned were crossover electronic rock, like Prodigy, Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.
Synthesizers were looked at as stealing the soul of music, but then there were these new bands who used it to contradict that idea.
The first album is a classic record and I think the prototype of a sound that no one else does.