Roxy Music Quotes
-
Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.
-
Basically, you're still sitting there using just the muscles of your hand, really. Of one hand, actually. It's another example of the transfer of literacy to making music because the assumption is that everything important is happening in your head; the muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn't how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They're using their whole body to make music, in fact.
-
I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.
-
Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
-
I mostly used the studio devices, because I knew what they had. Generally I find I'm happy to use whatever's around. If there's nothing there I'll make something. For example, one of the things I tried doing was getting a tiny loudspeaker and feeding the instruments off the tape through this tiny speaker and then through this huge long plastic tube - about 50 feet long - that they used to clean out the swimming pool in the place where I was staying. You get this really hollow, cavernous, weird sound, a very nice sound. We didn't use it finally, but nonetheless we well could have.
-
The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.
-
You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
-
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
-
American television really is pathetic.
-
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
-
Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
-
I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.
-
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
-
Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
-
With devices my technique is always to hide the handbook in the drawer until I've played with it for a while. The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it's a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren't predicted in the handbook, or that they didn't consider desirable. It's normally those other things that interest me.
-
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
-
I very rarely play the piano at home. Deliberately, so that when I do play it, I love it.
-
I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
-
I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.
-
Culture is everything you don't have to do.
-
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
-
Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.
-
Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
-
If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.