Roxy Music Quotes
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Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised.
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I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.
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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 felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
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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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One often makes music to supplement one's world.
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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 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 don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
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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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It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.
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I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
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I often work by avoidance.
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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 hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
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I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.
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There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
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I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
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Culture is everything you don't have to do.
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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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Ideas worth questioning: 'Being an artist is a job for life.'
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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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The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.
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People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.