Roxy Music Quotes
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The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
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The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist.
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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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I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
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When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we're really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don't have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.
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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.
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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.
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Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
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Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.
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It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
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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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Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult.
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Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results.
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You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.
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Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.
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I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
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If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.
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I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
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When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'
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My shows are not narratives.
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Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
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I'm an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call 'the last illusion.' The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what's going on but that the planets know what's going on.
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I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.
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I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.