Disguise voice n face for facebook4/4/2023 ![]() He invited me to do this “Report from New York” thing on his show. Shortly afterwards, I was working on a punk book called Volume that John Peel got hold of. I suggested she slow it down slightly to make it longer – it ended up eight minutes long – so I’d get paid more royalties if it was played on the radio. We got a National Endowment grant for $500 and she recorded it in her hallway because it was the quietest place she could find. I urged Laurie to put O Superman out on my label. I became the co-director of her show and put one of her songs on Airwaves, a double album put out by my small label, One Ten Records. Back then, she was a street artist and would do things like put ice-skates in big blocks of ice and play her violin standing on top of them. The other teacher, starting the same day, was Laurie Anderson. I was hired by the Whitney Museum in New York to teach art to schoolkids. We’re in the same war and our planes are still crashing.” You’re singing about current events.” I said: “It’s not so strange. ![]() I had just brought the song back to my live set when 9/11 happened. When the song went to No 2 in the UK, my artist friends told me I was selling out, but just months later the term being used was “crossing over”. But when I asked if they could press 80,000 records, they offered me an eight-album deal. Warner Brothers had been coming to my shows but I’d turned their offers down. Then suddenly John Peel started playing it on his radio show and a British distribution company asked for 80,000 copies. We pressed 1,000 copies and I’d individually wrap and post each one. I was a performance artist with no interest in the pop world, but friends convinced me to make a single, initially mail order. The song is based around a looped “ha ha ha ha” done on a harmoniser, but I wanted it to be like a Greek chorus – not just one voice – so I used a vocoder, which was originally developed as spy technology to disguise voices.
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