Roxy Music Quotes
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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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Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.
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Think inside the work - outside the work.
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All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.
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Secretly, I wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, but I could never quite pull it off.
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And Mary J. Blige, she's got all these fur coats and hats and stuff. She's good; I like her.
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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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In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the - they've had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads. They're wonderful because they do get your muscles working again. And what DJs do, of course, with their DJ turntables now, the CD turntables, which have pitch change and speed change and everything else. They're doing something that I think is interestingly physical.
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Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.
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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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In fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and, you can't notate that. You can't notate the sound of "St. Elmo's Fire." There's no way of writing that down. That's because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture; if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing - you're talking about 28,000 variables.
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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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Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable sic as it is interesting.
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What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.
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Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.
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I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.
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As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.
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If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.
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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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'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'
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Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
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The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.
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I tour a lot, sometimes like a hundred shows a year.