Roxy Music Quotes
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Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.
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Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment.
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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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Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
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Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
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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.
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Culture is everything you don't have to do.
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You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
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I very rarely play the piano at home. Deliberately, so that when I do play it, I love it.
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I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.
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Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
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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.
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American television really is pathetic.
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I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'
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With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think that's very significant that we're so attached to the idea now of - it was something I advocated for years, that you can make music in studios, music doesn't have to be made as a real-time experience. But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of "cut and paste" and "undo." And "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" again.
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Painting, I think it's like jazz.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.