Everyone knows I'm a big fan of ABBA but what a lot of people probably don't know is that it was Sleazy who gave me my first ABBA record, ‘Waterloo’, and some signed 10 x 8 photos of the band… ah, love at first sight. He could be quite generous when he wanted to be, though at the time I thought he might be trying to get into my pants. Well, he was, but that’s another story. I remember the day in 1980 when Super Trouper was released it was a really big thing. Throbbing Gristle were in former West Berlin and I asked to stop the splitter van at a record store near Zoologischer Garten, in the old city centre. I jumped out, rushed into the store and bought it on cassette, I stuck it in my Walkman and began walking back to the van but started jumping about to the music.
Of course everyone was laughing and I was completely embarrassed, but I just couldn't help myself. I refused to put it on in the van and sat in the back in my own reverie playing it on headphones with a big smile on my face while we drove to Checkpoint Charlie for a Throbbing Gristle photoshoot. No one else in Throbbing Gristle ever really got ABBA, it seemed completely alien to them,“Why would you like that?" Except later on when Cosey and I started our affair and I gave her a copy of ‘Dancing Queen’ to use in her stripping routine. It didn’t occur to me that its way too fast to strip to, so she rarely used it but it became our seventies secret love affair song.
