Having recently helped to produce a BBC 6 Music show celebrating Beck’s music and his influence to mark the 10th birthday of his 2014 album Morning Phase (it can be listened on demand via BBC Sounds until the middle of March 2024), I had to revisit a 2017 interview we did about his record collection. This one was such a fun chat with Mr Hansen that when the inevitable nudge came that we were “running out of time” he insisted we carry on to include all the records he picked out – he was enjoying himself. It’s a great selection, with some great stories, so here is the full version of our conversation, including at one extra album that didn’t make it into print at the time…

The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground & Nico
Verve Records 1967
The first record I discovered was the first one, with the banana, which was a pretty seminal record for me. It’s the album that launched a thousand bands. I found it in my mom’s music collection. I was bored one day and I didn’t have much money to buy records – maybe one a month at most as a teenager – so I found this record and thought I’d give it a try. I couldn’t believe how raw and distorted and dissonance it was for that era. I discovered it as Sonic Youth and Jesus And Mary Chain were coming out so it felt it interceded into those records. It was a record I’d never heard anyone talk about or mention. Maybe it was just as it was about to be championed more. I’d say that their third record had some of my favourite songs on. That was the record that made me a true fan. It has Candy Says, Pale Blue Eyes, Sunset Free, all those songs. It’s more of an intimate record. The two extremes of the Velvet Underground is something I can relate to in my music, but you can find it in The Beatles, Neil Young, a lot of the great artists, a vulnerable sweetness and then this ferocious chaos. I had no idea what it would sound like from the banana, maybe the Stones but then the first song is Sunday Morning so it draws you in as this sweet song with the celeste piano playing. It’s almost like a girl group version of a Buddy Holly song, it’s very haunting and sweet, so that took me by surprise. Then there’s that sound of the rhythm guitars together that mesh into one idea, it’s similar to what The Stones had which was very messy and cool and had a groove. I think that the sound of Sterling and Lou’s guitars together is very underestimated, especially on songs like Waiting For My Man. Then you have the addition of Nico. I had already seen La Dolce Vita (below) and I put together somehow – there was no internet you had to actually talk to people to figure things out – that Nico was in the film, which blew my mind. Then there was the Warhol connection, discovering the whole Factory situation. But the most surreal thing was, we were living in a rundown apartment near downtown East LA, and my mother noticed my interest in the record and said, “I knew those people, I was around when they were making that music.” That was just fantastical, “How do you know these people and that record?” “I used to dance for them!” Then many decades later, as things started materialse on the internet I started to see all these pictures of mom with these people. So it was true! But she never sat down and played me anything I just gravitated to it. As a kid, there wasn’t a lot of options going on. I’d get curious. I spend a lot of time in thrift stores and libraries digging through records.

Woody Guthrie
Dust Bowl Ballads
Victor Records 1940
For me as a kid, I started discovering folk music. I grew up in an era where there were a lot of singer-songwriters, that confessional songwriting era, so it was a revelation to me to find the Carter Family and Woodie Guthrie, then later on Hank Williams and country artists. I found in the library they had these Library Of Congress records and I found a copy of this Woodie Guthrie record. The Dustbowl Ballads were about this dust storm disaster that had happened in Oklahoma where he lived, there was an exodus and diaspora of people leaving Texas and Oklahoma largely to come to California and these songs were so raw and so direct. Maybe there was something punk about them to me at the time, that’s how I received it. The idea that somebody had got a guitar and written about these things that were happening around them was very empowering, in the 80s when it was the height of the pop era, where songs were just produced in this unattainable superhuman way. This was a record where someone had a guitar and created a whole world without any kind of production or needing any equipment, that definitely turned a light bulb on for me. I learned every song on the record and my first gigs were me just performing those old folk songs.

Public Enemy
It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back
Def Jam 1988
This record couldn’t be further from what a lot of hip-hop sounds like now, but when it came out it was just such a jolt. Sonically, the message of it, the beats, the way they were using language and words, it really tied into this stream-of-consciousness stuff I was hearing on Bob Dylan records. It was a really powerful record. It’s one of those records that if you were there when it came out it felt like a bunch of doors just opened. They embraced the album. I remember where hip hop songs were all singles or off a soundtrack, the idea that it was a full album concept and sonically, it was so ahead of its time. The way it was taking bits of music and making a whole cloth out of bits of samples and found sounds was very influential to me. When I eventually recorded Loser when I was doing the vocal on the song in my head I was trying to sound like Chuck D [laughs] I mean it obviously sounds nothing like it but everyone has that thing in the back of their minds that they’re trying to do but you wind up somewhere else.

David Bowie
Hunky Dory
RCA 1971
The interesting thing with Bowie or Dylan, artists who have a long catalogue of so many great records, is as you go through life different records of theirs become your favourite. All of a sudden Nashville Skyline is my favourite record, how did that happen? So I picked this as it’s where I started, this and Station to Station. There are artists who have those defining records, and obviously, Bowie has Ziggy Stardust and Low as high watermarks, but there’s always that record right before where you can feel something special is coming to fruition. Somebody is finding their voice, their originality. There’s a creative optimism and energy that you can’t quite describe. That’s what Hunky Dory has. Everything Bowie was doing was crystallising and forming. The record has a lot of charm and a youthful optimism. They’re songs that are a little more fanciful than other records he’s done but when I was a kid that was the record that really spoke to me. Now I tend to gravitate towards Lodger or Scary Monsters. [laughs]

Tom Waits
Rain Dogs
Island 1985
That’s one of those records that’s a revelation. There were all these strains of music that I was attracted to and then somebody brings them all together, puts a spin on it and creates something new out of it, that’s a rarefied thing. So when I found that record it was such a surprise. Purists would pick Swordfishtrombones, but Rain Dogs has so many great songs and I remember around that time Jim Jarmusch had just come out with a movie and then there was a point where they made a movie together, which I went to go see right when it came out. It was this whole other alternate world that was maybe something that was happening during that period of time. I noticed there was a whole scene around East Los Angeles, maybe in other cities too where musicians and artists were creating this alternate world that didn’t really exist. It’s sort of this cross-section of jazz and punk and hipster street culture and film noir and old dive bars. There is something romantic about it and what it created. He really created a world. The lyrics, the humour and the blues are all mixed together in a way that’s timeless. That was a big record for me.

Daniel Johnston
1990
Shimmy Disc 1990
I moved to New York when I was 18. I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t have a job, I was struggling so I came into this of musicians and artists in the Lower East Side at the time. We would stand on the corner playing songs, lots of different musicians, and there was a song everybody was singing called Don’t Play Cards With Satan. I remember them teaching it to me, and I learned it just like in the folk days. So I thought it was a folk song I never heard. Turns out it was by Daniel Johnston, who’d left New York a month or two before I got there. I kept hearing all these stories about him and I’d hear different people playing his songs. There was a bit of a legend about him. He put our cassette tapes, but I don’t know anyone who had one, but these songs I’d learned I’d loved. Then he finally put out a record called 1989 – not to be confused with Taylor Swift, it came out in 1989 – it was a strange little record. Members of Sonic Youth were playing on it which took it in another direction for me, worlds were colliding. It feels like a half-finished document where they were trying to catch what this musician was doing as he was in transition from one place to another. It felt like they were just trying capture and document it. In a way it tied into those folk records that I grew up listening to. There was a very childlike, plaintive singing that was very heart-breaking. You could tell there was a lot of intensity and pain in the songs that were incredibly raw. I didn’t know much about him, there were no documentaries at the time, no way to find much about him so I actually wrote to him at a post office box and got some cassettes and drawings, which really struck me at the time. Years later I got to meet him. My version of Don’t Play Cards With Satan was pretty far from his, yeah, but in that way that you can name any folk song in the 60s and find 20 people who have done a version of it. Different variations. It’s probably the last moment anything like that could possibly happen, you just had to go down on the street to learn a song, and it’s by somebody who just blew through town, who was hanging out on that same street a couple of months ago and I had no idea who he was.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
Your Funeral… My Trial
Mute Records 1986
A friend lent me this. It was very striking and I hadn’t heard anything quite like it. He lent me From Her To Eternity at the same time and the phantasmagoria of words and imagery, at the time I’d just got into the Dylan records with really elaborate lyrics and this was a demonic punk iteration of a similar thing. It was a really power record and then I got to see him play live which was incredibly striking. He just blew me away. It was like seeing James Brown and the Sex Pistols at the same time, but that was not even a fair description it was something else! It was powerful and intense and just that feeling that the MC5 and The Stooges must have given, except they were all wearing suits, which at the time seemed counterintuitive. You weren’t supposed to be wearing a suit. The music was so heavy and dark, intense and exciting. You had somebody who had this deep well of poetry and music which was coming from this understanding of words and literature, but onstage it was just this raw powerful force. It was an interesting combination. It was violent but there was also all this colour and haunting quality.

Serge Gainsbourg
Histoire de Melody Nelson
Philips Records 1971
I always like to recommend Serge Gainsbourg, because when I got into his music I didn’t feel his music was really recognised in America. Since then I’ve been involved in tribute concerts and I got to do a duet with his wife, Jane Birkin, on French TV. He’s one of those artists whom you could recommend ten different records because he has jazz records, synth-pop records and reggae records. Melody Nelson is my favourite, and a lot of people’s favourite. When he was going to London to record these records you can tell it’s coming right out of that classic era of London. It also has all these orchestrations from John Claude Varnier who was the conductor. It’s very dramatic orchestral arrangements, I had never heard a rock band with an orchestra sound like this record. Usually, in the context of a rock album, the orchestra is background or padding, or you heard something like Elenor Rigby where a rock singer is singing with strings. This was this fluid rock band with this orchestra coming from this classical place all combined, and it’s seamless. Then you have his vocals which are incredibly forward in the mix. The real start of that record is the way it’s mixed. The orchestra and the vocals are very loud and the band is turned down. There’s not really any record like it. It’s all in French but lyrically it’s really interesting and he made a film of it for TV – I got a bootleg of it in Japan years ago – which takes it even further in its mystique. We got to recreate it live a few years back at the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago with a full orchestra and John Varnier. I have a friend who only likes the 80s stuff, they don’t care for the 60s stuff. He embraced every era he was in but somehow remained himself which is a really interesting thing. I put him up there with artists like Prince and Bowie who were adventures.

Caetano Veloso
Caetano Veloso
Philips 1969
He’s a Brazilian artist who I’ve been friends with for years, but he’s someone I discovered when my roommate when I was 19 took off to travel to travel around Brazil with no money and a backpack. He came back after six months, fluent in Portuguese and with a couple of cassettes and one of them was Caetano Veloso which he’d bought on the street. We’d sat listening to it while he told me his tales of going up the Amazon and wandering around Vihea, friends that he made, and being in a bar when he had a knife pulled on him. He went to a village where someone tried to keep and marry him off. As I was listening to the cassette I’d hear all these tales. My favourite of his is self-titled, which is a little confusing because there are four of them and they came out all in a row! [laughs] It’s the one from 69 with the white cover. It’s a great record. It has a lot of orchestration mixed with samba and bosa nova. It’s a really great record. After that I discovered more Brazilian artists, it’s a really rich seam. As I’ve got to know Caetano over the years I’ve seen many of his shows, he’s incredibly brilliant. Around the time he made this record, the military arrested him and put him in captivity. He has this harrowing story of when he had big wild hair and they marched him off to his execution and put him in the chair. And as he was taking in the last moments of his life a man walked in with a pair of scissors, they’d brought him in there to cut his hair! It’s perverse torture and he’s been through so much, but he told me that story over dinner one night. He also had a TV show – there are no tapes of it now – but it had all the great artists of the time on it in the 60s. When there was a military coup he went on air in one episode and sang this very famous Christmas song with a gun to his head as a sort of performance piece and political statement. Then you listen to his music and there’s so much joy and tenderness, it’s incredibly sensual and rich. You need to hear him.

Cornelius
Point
Trattoria Records, 2001
He’s such a great artist. This is a very clear, clean-sounding record. It’s so precise, it has so much precision. It’s one of those records that still sounds like its time hasn’t come yet. It’s still from the future. I would say it’s the opposite of the.