Roxy Music Quotes
-
Painting, I think it's like jazz.
-
I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
-
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 despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
-
I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
-
One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.
-
In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
-
If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.
-
The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.
-
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
-
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.
-
My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
-
I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.
-
Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before.
-
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
-
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
-
You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.
-
Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
-
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.
-
Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.
-
I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect.
-
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.
-
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
-
I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.