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With Los Angeles, it's kind of a love-hate thing. Sometimes I think it's marvelous, and sometimes I think it's a dump. It's so fake and I can't deal with how fake it is.
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Writing a song is actually quite easy. Writing a good one is very, very difficult.
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To be honest, I'm a bit of a snob now; give me a Four Seasons anywhere in the world and I'm happy. Also, they've just opened a Ritz-Carlton in County Wicklow, Ireland, which is stunning and has great views.
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I saw the Stones three years ago at the Wiltern Theater in L.A. and that was mind blowing.
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Any idiot who knows five chords can bang a song together. But it's probably going to be rubbish.
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I never really enjoyed sex with groupies though. It's like having a wank - you get 30 seconds of guilt when you've finished.
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We are just fans of music, we are not fans of a specific kind of music. We just happen to be a rock band. Until we explain ourselves, sometimes people don't understand why we limit ourselves to just being a rock band. It's because that is what we like doing.
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There are networks of groupies - and nowadays it's instant because of the internet. Before, it took days to tell your penpal 'I just had Jimi Hendrix'. Nowadays, 20 minutes after you've zipped your trousers up, it's in New Zealand! Somebody e-mailed me a groupie website that I was on, and there was somebody describing my tackle. It was flattering but completely fucking wrong - I'd be the first to say that I don't have a ten-and-a-half-inch dick!
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Every town in America had at least one, two, or maybe three radio stations that played rock 24 hours a day. In England, we had a rock specialist on for two hours a week.
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If you can't handle the responsibility of a hit single, don't write one.
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Rock and roll has always been very basic. The actual relationship between a man and a woman is different for everyone on the planet. One of the truest forms of contact is singing about boy-meets-girl. I can strut like a peacock on stage, but that's about as far as it goes. It's up to other people to see what they see. We're not overtly sexual in the sense that we go around wearing codpieces.
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Music and soccer. They would be my two major passions.
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When we set out to replace Steve Clark, Vivian Campbell exceeded our wildest expectations.
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A fan would get an autograph and that was that. If we didn't tour again for five years, we wouldn't remember them.
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The Vatican takes your breath away.
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There were incredibly few rock songs making it out to the airwaves until the '80s came along.
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I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones.
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I suppose I do have half decent legs. They're long and lean. Most of the time, people go on about my eyes. When I was little, people used to call me Ching Chong Chinamen in the days before political correctness. When I got older, they became a positive feature.
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That's why 60,000 people go ape when the Stones play 'Satisfaction.' The songs are part of their legacy, and you fall back in love with them over the years.
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Sometimes after a gig one of the band would say 'Did you see that girl down the front?' and somebody would say 'Do you want me to get her back?' But, generally we met them at the hotel or backstage. For a girl to get backstage in the first place, she'd probably blown half the crew - and I'm not into sharing in that respect. We had one roadie who actually had a heart attack on tour with us in 1983 - he was a big, big guy and he was doing at least four or five groupies a day!
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In England, rock music very rarely infiltrates the charts, but country music even less so.
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Goodbye Pete Willis, hello Phil Collen. We decided to try to do something that no other rock band had tried before - blueprint "Sgt. Pepper". A period in time when we allowed our Pop sensibility to come to the fore ... and guess what? Our first major success...huge in the U.S. ... but nowhere else ..
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Some of the demos we do are better than a lot of people's albums.
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Any time I can get off is my favorite holiday. I don't pay too much attention to traditional times because we're often working on Christmas and have to celebrate in January. But I love Christmas. The old clichés are true. To watch someone's face when they're opening a present is mind-blowing really.