I was terrified to look at it in case I could see myself as some awkward teenager on Billy Cobham’s side of the stage. 'There’s footage of that show on YouTube (see below). The notes and rhythms he and his band performed, not to mention the sheer attack of it all, constituted something I had never considered could have a place in the genre. In my mind, what he was playing was a strange new take on rock‘n’roll. 'This short-haired guy played his guitar like he was possessed. But what McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra came out and did next – the sound, the visual element and especially the music – damaged me for life. The audience sat in the sun on a grassy hill while Ravi Shankar played – which was mindblowing. I was just a 13-year-old kid at an outdoor show at Syracuse University in 1972. That, for me, makes their whole catalogue fascinating.Ĭhris Goss (Producer/Masters Of Reality): 'I’ll never forget the day I discovered John McLaughlin’s music. This is a guy who, whenever King Crimson threatened to become successful, would break them up and go off and play with Blondie or go into retreat or disband the group and form a completely different band under the same name. 'King Crimson and Robert Fripp were the most fascinating of all for me. He had a vision for a whole sound, a whole ideology around his band, and that’s been very inspirational to me. So I fell in love with the idea of the album as a musical journey. Wonderful records in every genre, whether it was Donna Summer making great disco records, Marvin Gaye making great soul records or King Crimson and Pink Floyd making these great art rock albums.

'And I began to discover this wonderful era, what you’d call the great album era, from 1967 to 1977, from Sgt Pepper through to punk. I wasn’t interested in any of that, so I found solace in the 60s and 70s music that my parents were listening to. There were some interesting things developing, but everyone I knew wanted to be in Level 42, Simple Minds or U2. I grew up in the 80s, and it was a pretty bad decade for music. Steven Wilson: 'He’s probably the biggest influence of all for me.

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