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When I'm singing I try not be a singer with a capital S. I just try to get it out so I feel comfortable with it.
Robert Wyatt -
Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
Robert Wyatt
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I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.
Robert Wyatt -
I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law.
Robert Wyatt -
Potentially, America is really the greatest, but it's not yet, I don't think. It's too much like an old-fashioned empire, waving the stick and dropping too many bombs on too many people.
Robert Wyatt -
The missing links in my life's work, no less!
Robert Wyatt -
When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.
Robert Wyatt -
I get slightly irritated by people who say they're natural rebels because it just means that they're going to be against whatever anybody does, which is almost like saying you might as well leave it as it is.
Robert Wyatt
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What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
Robert Wyatt -
I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I'm just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left.
Robert Wyatt -
Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.
Robert Wyatt -
I think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world. The US is the Western empire of the 19th century regrouping in the 20th, not out of wickedness, but because everybody else in Eurasia was so completely destroyed by the Second World War. Economically, that was quite a useful time for the US, so they ended up in the position of enormous power. And like any great power, they're going to act in their own interests. The problem is due to what the business community wants, which is to make as much money as they can out of what other people do and pay as little as possible for it.
Robert Wyatt -
I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.
Robert Wyatt -
There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.
Robert Wyatt
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There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.
Robert Wyatt -
People have habits about what they think songs should be like. There's the folky thing of: "Poor me, I'm a sensitive person in a cruel world." Or the pop thing of: "Hey, look at me, I'm sexy."
Robert Wyatt -
The United States is a country where everybody can start again.
Robert Wyatt -
Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience.
Robert Wyatt -
I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.
Robert Wyatt -
When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice.
Robert Wyatt
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In fact, when the fires of empire get hidden, they still stay burning underneath the moss, seething away. This is true with a lot of the countries with really difficult, impenetrable nationalist movements - countries that once had a big empire, like Turkey, England, or even in Italy, with the fascists in the middle of the last century. People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.
Robert Wyatt -
I really liked them, not just Syd, but all of them. Roger was very important, I thought, his contribution. And so was Rick's organ playing. It was a good band. It became something else completely, obviously.
Robert Wyatt -
There are people I would like to work with. Its a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I cant really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.
Robert Wyatt -
I would encourage people to realize that you don't have to panic if you're not part of a mainstream, or if you find yourself outside the flow. If it doesn't suit you, don't go along with it. Just sit it out and get your stuff done. Don't just sit moaning or getting drunkāI spent some years doing that. But if you can just come up with something of your own, however minor it is, that's going to be easier to live with when you're at the end of your life.
Robert Wyatt