‘Our producer was toasting sesame seeds in a pan. Coming from a working-class family, I’d never seen such a thing’
Ed and I had just come off a long tour of Europe and North America supporting Simple Minds and needed a break. I immersed myself in music-making with a synth, drum machine and a four-track Tascam Portastudio. I was very inspired by Brian Eno. I’d seen the words “found sounds” on his album credits. The notion that any sound could be included in a recording struck me as magical. I just held a mic out of my bedroom window. Black Man Ray started out as an ambient number with an intro featuring the sound of a boy I recorded singing in the street below. In the end, he actually featured in the opening bars of our song The Highest High.
Black Man Ray has that classic China Crisis synth sound, but our producer Walter Becker did a huge amount of work on it, as he did on all the tracks on Flaunt the Imperfection, our third album. Virgin Records were keen to follow up the success of our single Wishful Thinking and would have been bending Walter’s ear, telling him to focus on songs that sounded like potential hits. We recorded Black Man Ray at the Parkgate Studio in Sussex – in the kitchen! I have a vivid memory of it, mainly because Walter had sesame seeds in the pan, toasting them. Coming from a very working-class family, I’d never seen such a thing.
