Roxy Music Quotes
-
John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.
-
We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That's occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of - a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we're going to stay there until I take my finger down.
-
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.
-
I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
-
I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.
-
Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.
-
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.
-
Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
-
I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.
-
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.
-
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
-
People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.
-
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences... That solves a lot of problems ... Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen ... [W]hat makes a work of art 'good' for you is not something that is already 'inside' it, but something that happens inside you.
-
Honor thy error as a hidden intention.
-
Think inside the work - outside the work.
-
Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.
-
Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
Roxy was just going too safe, and at the time I was also a bit pissed off at the business—not with playing, but with the people in it.
-
Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.
-
And Mary J. Blige, she's got all these fur coats and hats and stuff. She's good; I like her.
-
I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.
