Roxy Music Quotes
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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've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
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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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Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.
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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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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 very rarely play the piano at home. Deliberately, so that when I do play it, I love it.
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Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
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Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
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I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's.
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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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Ideas worth questioning: 'Being an artist is a job for life.'
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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 belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
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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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I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.
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One often makes music to supplement one's world.
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There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off.
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When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt.
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Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
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I have these headphones, which pretty much exclude everything else so that you can really completely control the sound that you're hearing. I don't use them very much, I have to say. I very rarely listen on headphones.
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As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head.
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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.
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Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult.