"I love the smell of wet paint in the morning. It smells to me like...decorating. When I was a child I was gifted in that I had the ability to help people choose their wallpaper. It was something that I found out when I was 13 years old. I had a job working one day of a week in a shop which sold hardware, and people would come in and they would describe abstract objects to me and I would have to tell them what kind of screw they needed to screw these objects to their wall. And they would come and tell me the problems that they had with their lights in their house. But by far and away the most difficult thing was this kind of decision about wallpaper...well, wallpaper is a very important thing. I don't think we understand on the Left how important wallpaper is because when you make a decision about wallpaper it's not just an off the cuff kind of thing like "I'll have a beer" or "I'll have chicken curry" or something. Wallpaper is for life and consequently people don't want to make a mistake. They don't want to get wallpaper home and then people come round and say "Oh". No one wants their entire life to sit and look at their wallpaper and feel bad about it. People want to feel good about their wallpaper and so they would come to me. They would come to me and I would talk to them for a while and sometimes I would hold their hands. They would tell me about their lives and their homes and I would by instinct go then to the wallpaper book. There would be silence in the shop and I would look in the book of wallpaper until I came to a pattern. It's kind of like a Rorschach test...you're looking for something in the wallpaper that speaks to these people of their experience. And downstairs of this wallpaper shop, in the basement was a record shop and during my lunch hour as a relief from the pressure of being this wallpaper kid, I would go down there and get the records from the racks and sniff them...and they just smelled so good. Have you ever tried to smell a CD ? It smells only of profit. It doesn't smell of rock 'n' roll. A record smells of vinyl and rock 'n' roll, and culture, and solvents...and I can't deal with the CD. All it ever says to me, the CD, is "hmmmmmm". When you press the button it goes in, it goes "hmmmmmm". And when you switch it off it kinda goes "ahhhhhhh", like it's thankful that it doesn't have to play any more Dire Straits. Whereas a record if you leave it just goes on forever, "tshhhhh, tshhhhh, tshhhhh". Now you wanna know "Why is he telling us all this ?", "Why is he sharing this experience with us ?", we Germans who have the best wallpaper...or think we have the best wallpaper. The reason I'm telling you all this is because I was that Saturday Boy.".
"The Smell Of Profit" bootleg, Germany
October 1991