Roxy Music Quotes
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I describe things in terms of body movements. I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that's a good way of talking to musicians. Particularly bass players.
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The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.
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Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.
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I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
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I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.
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I can never predict what's going to happen.
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I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.
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You can never get silence anywhere nowadays, have you noticed?
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Sometimes something intrigues me about particular sounds, how they work together, and I think "Okay, I've found something here; I'm going to take it somewhere." And sometimes just to find a name for that sound, whatever it is, ends up becoming a title of the piece or becoming part of the title.
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What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The 'take control of things' mode, the 'be careful, watch out' mode, the 'speed' mode - the 'Red Bull' mode, actually. There's nothing wrong with it. It's all part of what we are.
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I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.
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It's nice to know that there are several different avenues I could pursue.
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Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.
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Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.
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I don't really have a great deal of spare time. I still have a house in the country, but I'm in London 90 percent of the time.
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For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.
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Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.
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I didn't really want to give up music.
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You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.
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What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.
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I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
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I often say to people that producing is the best-paid form of cowardice. When you produce things, you almost always get credit if it's a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it's not! You don't really take responsibility for your work.
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I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.
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The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.