Roxy Music Quotes
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I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
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It's insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it's assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It's that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he's telling you something about his own life. It's so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!
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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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Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.
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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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Women! I have no idea. I don't know anything about women at all. They're a complete mystery to me.
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I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
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I like the name Atomic Kitten. It's so great.
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I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.
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I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
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When I was at college - that was the first time I tried singing. I played in a band, and people seemed to like it.
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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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I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn't what they wanted. So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people "Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work." And of course I'm very pleased if people like all of them, but I don't want them to feel deceived at any point.
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I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.
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Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
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If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.
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I will be putting out a fragrance - I'm following in the great steps of Puff Daddy.
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People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
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I like to piece together different guitarists, unlikely bedfellows. You have Jonny Greenwood playing next to Nile Rodgers on the same track, so it becomes like an orchestra of sounds.
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I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.
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I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'
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Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
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I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.
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I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.