Fred Armisen's nine favourite songs | Interview (2024)

BEST FIT: How did you first get turned on to music from the UK, Fred?

FRED ARMISEN: Well first of all you have to subtract the idea of The Beatles because The Beatles is such a big part of everybody's life. It's like they're almost bigger than just England! So skipping over that, I would say, when I was 14, or 15. I was getting into to British punk – even though I was late to it – on Long Island, New York where I grew up.

For some reason me and my friends just hooked onto The Clash, and The Jam and Sex Pistols. When you guys got it – let's say it's 1977 – I was only 10 or 11 or something. So for us, we got this other wave of it, and to us it was brand new. We loved anything that came through and we didn't separate: New Wave, Ska, it was all punk to us. So Bow Wow Wow, for example, I'm sure they didn't think of themselves as a punk band, but to us, they were. I know that Gary Numan is considered New Wave too, but all those records went together for us. I was in a suburb and we were going to record stores in the city. There were some radio stations that were starting to play New Wave music, and they would throw a lot of this stuff in and it really shaped me hearing British music.

Any interview with The Clash, we just memorised it, we knew everything that all those guys said, the Sex Pistols, just everybody! When MTV started, there would be videos too. We’d watch Madness videos and you’d see the look of London… those sort of yellow bricks, and the way that they were dressing up, and we’d be like, “Whoa! That's England! That's London!”

And once I finally got to go to England, it actually did look like that too. So whenever I get to come to England, I associate so much of it with that music. I assume that every British person I meet knows the entire history of punk, even if they're the wrong age. I just want to be like, “Hey, you're from the place that Captain Sensible is from? You must know that right? Like, even though you go on and you do your work every day, you must know, every day, that this is the land of Captain Sensible!”

I know that isn't really the case, I know it's irrational, but that's how I see England. Even when I land at Heathrow and I’m going through customs, I think, you know, this the land of the Stranglers, the land of The Slits!

Captain Sensible is such an outlier figure of punk, I remember his song “Happy Talk” was a staple of pre-teen school discos as a little kid.

We – and I – loved The Damned so much. They are really the greatest - the phases they went through, and their love for that spooky sound, but also that punk sound and the psychedelic sound. They were so honest about how psychedelic music influenced them. And I feel that Captain Sensible is probably the best musician out of anyone in any of those scenes. When we played, they were the songs we’d play; we learned “Wait for the Blackout”. Strawberries is definitely my favourite album of theirs and there’s a song on there called “Life Goes On” where Captain Sensible sings. It’s just one of my favourite songs ever – a song about feeling good about being alive – and from that I got into his solo albums. He had a sort of Greatest Hits package of his singles in the States and we would listen to the hell out of that album. What I liked about him and about punk is that it can be melodic and happy and fun.

What is it about “Brenda (Parts 1 and 2)” that you love so much?

Something about it really reminds me of England. There's these lyrics in it about being an animal in a yellow plastic bin with geraniums on the front and it seems so British to me. It’s my fantasy of what England is. And then he sort of jams out on it… he builds this track that’s not a simple pop song and he just jams out on it!

I believe in Captain Sensible and I think he’s a British national treasure. As soon as I see a picture of him or a video, of him in concert, it just makes me really happy. I'm happy with the existence of Captain Sensible! How you don't have a statue to him here yet, I'll never know. But that should be the first thing you see at the airport!

Fred Armisen's nine favourite songs | Interview (2024)
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