David Bowie convinced James Murphy to reform LCD Soundsystem

We’ve many things to be thankful to the late David Bowie for, and it turns out there’s something else we need to add to the list: he convinced James Murphy to reform LCD Soundsystem.

Chatting on Lauren Laverne’s 6 Music show, Murphy discussed his friendship with Bowie, which formed while working closely together on a few projects before his death last year. Their collaborations included Murphy lending percussion to Bowie’s final album Blackstar and working together on Arcade Fire’s Reflektor, with Bowie providing some vocals while Murphy produced.

During these projects, Bowie convinced Murphy that it was worth trying to put LCD Soundsystem back together, despite how “uncomfortable” the idea made the frontman.

“I spent a good amount of time with David Bowie,” Murphy told Laverne, “and I was talking about getting the band back together. He said ‘does it make you uncomfortable?’ I said ‘yeah’, and he said ‘good, it should, it should make you feel uncomfortable’.”

At first, Murphy didn’t take kindly to the advice. “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,’” he says. “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!"

Of course, that's not what Bowie was like at all: "He was always making himself uncomfortable," conceeds Murphy. 

LCD Soundsystem’s new album American Dream is released 1 Sep. Listen to title track to American Dream below, and listen to Murphy’s full 6 Music interview