James Murphy Says David Bowie Convinced Him To Get LCD Soundsystem Back Together
We as a species have a lot to thank David Bowie for, and one of the last items on that list is his advice to James Murphy that resulted in LCD Soundsystem getting back together (a cause for gratitude indeed). As NME points out, Murphy gave an interview to BBC 6 Music explaining that when he was weighing the decision to re-form the band, Bowie urged him to run headfirst into challenges that made him uncomfortable. Here’s the quote:
I spent a good amount of time with David Bowie, and I was talking about coming back, putting the band together. And I was going through the hems and haws of it, and he said, “Does it make you uncomfortable?” And I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “Good. It should. You should be uncomfortable.” And the first thing that popped into my head was, “What the? What do you know? You don’t know what it’s like to be uncomfortable.” That was my thinking. Because of course I’m imagining that if I was David Bowie, I’d just be walking around flipping everybody off, like, “I’m David Bowie!” Like, nobody can say anything! Unless maybe Lou Reed’s there, and then he can be like, “Alright.” There are maybe one or two people that get to literally not — nothing can be said about them. But that’s not who he was ever in his life. He was always making himself uncomfortable. And it was such a great feeling of, like, you just don’t know what you are to anybody else.
And here’s audio of Murphy’s story:
LCD’s fourth album American Dream arrives 9/1 via Columbia; thanks, Bowie!