Roxy Music Quotes
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Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.
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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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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.
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I like L.A., but I shouldn't live there.
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I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.
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I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.
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The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it?
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My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.
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I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.
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I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.
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If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.
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Another way of working is setting deliberate constraints that aren't musical ones - like saying, "Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it's going to have changes here, here and here, and there's going to be a convolution of events here, and there's going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it." Those are the sort of visual ideas that I can draw out on graph paper. I've done a lot of film music this way.
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If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.
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I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.
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Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.
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Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
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Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
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The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.
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I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
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It's quite funny that, 20 years ago, one would have thought putting out a fragrance would [negatively] affect your musical credibility. Now it may enhance it.
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The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.
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I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.
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I've had quite a few moments I've liked, so it's good enough.