Robert Wyatt Quotes
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I don't want to be a professional cripple. And I don't see the suicide stuff as tragic.
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I don't want an entire world full of people just drinking Coca-Cola and eating McDonald's hamburgers and listening to American pop records. That would be a lesser world. I hope the cultural diversity is rich and is able to survive the Westernization of their economies.
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I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar
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What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
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I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.
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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.
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Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
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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.
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What I like about popular culture is its accessibility, and I've covered popular songs because they are amazing things.
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It's funny that Chairman Mao's great hero was Napoleon, because Napoleon started out as a revolutionary for the underdogs and then made himself an emperor. In fact, a lot of revolutionary leaders do that, and you think, "Well, that's spoiling your argument. What are you doing?" But on the other hand, the people themselves are enjoying trying out all these different ways to be. I hope that, like the Japanese, the Chinese hang on to their own traditions as well as try out Western ones. I hate it when people just lose so much confidence in who they are that they abandon their own culture.
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The United States is a country where everybody can start again.
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Drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble.
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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.
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In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.
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I do think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world.
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I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.
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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.
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It just doesnt mean anything to me, the high-profile, big money side of things. I just want enough to live on, and to be able to get on with what I do, and hang around my friends.
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The gap between rich and poor is, in fact, widening enormously. This idea of building up the powers of people who are already powerful and keeping everyone else back is a recipe for endless misery and conflict.
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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.