Roxy Music Quotes
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Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
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One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.
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I'm very opinionated.
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The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
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The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.
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Much as I love the northeast, I didn't want to spend my life there. I wanted to experiment. Savour everything you can while you're here! Touring, seeing the world... That in itself gives you a different perspective.
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I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.
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I did some songs for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. I had done a jazz album of Roxy songs, and they used bits of it in the film. It would be nice to score a movie one day.
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When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.
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Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before.
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I don't do interviews at all when I'm on tour, so this time, on a day off, I'll do that kind of thing a little bit. I don't do big promotion schedules, not when I'm touring.
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Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.
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At home I don't really have any drum machines or anything like that, I just have a piano and a cassette machine, an old-fashioned one, an old relic which I've always used.
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Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.
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I like L.A., but I shouldn't live there.
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You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
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Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
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The micro-compositions are the pieces themselves, but the macro-composition is the whole set of them and how it moves from track to track and how the titles relate to one another, for example. Always when I do records like this of a selection of instrumental pieces - the titles, to me, are very important.
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Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I'm struggling all the way through to think, "What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I'm hearing that I like so much?" And it's nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It's something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it's both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.
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Except in a few cases like Music for Airports, which was a very clear case of noticing a niche [and] saying, "Okay, there's this situation in which people always play music, and nobody has written music for that situation so I'm going to." So, that was a very clear example of spotting a niche and working for it. I have done that occasionally.
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Get down with your old Allman Bros. records!
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I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.
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I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
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Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.