David Bowie Persuaded James Murphy to Reunite LCD Soundsystem

LCD Soundsystem reunited last year, and it turns out that David Bowie is the person responsible for the return of the group.

Frontman James Murphy spent time with Bowie working on Bowie’s record, Blackstar, on which he contributed percussion parts. The iconic musician asked Murphy if the thought of an LCD Soundsystem reunion made him uncomfortable.

“And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said ‘Good. It should. You should be uncomfortable,’” Murphy recalled in an interview on BBC 6 Music.

Murphy was also invited to co-produce Blackstar, but the thought of it was overwhelming to him, he revealed in a separate interview on BBC Radio 1.

“I would have had to be somebody else,” Murphy said. “There’s a reason I make music the way I do.”

The LCD Soundsystem frontman also revealed that he wanted to make a collaborative record with Bowie, just the two of them.

“I reached out to David and said, ‘I’d love to do a record just me and you.’ He said, ‘It’s funny you mention that, please look me up when you get back to New York,’” Murphy said on Radio 1. Although the duo met, Bowie had already begun working on Blackstar.

Read Murphy’s full statement on Bowie’s encouragement below, and listen to performances from both LCD and Bowie via the Paste Cloud further down. LCD Soundsystem’s first album in seven years, American Dream, will arrive on Sept. 1.

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.