A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
After the concert, several people told me that it had them crying on the first few bars.
Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.
All these songs have no meaning that I invested in them. Meanings can be generated within their own framework.
As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
Classical music is founded on a very clear distinction between music and noise. In rock, as in electronic music, these barriers are coming down.
Computers are so badly designed!
Digital guitar is a guitar threaded through a digital delay but fed back on itself a lot so it makes this cardboard tube type sound.
Each individual stays on their own territory. That's what it was like on most of my collaborations.
Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He's very quick.
First of all, I never had the impression that I was always having to fight against everyone else. I have always had friends who supported me, or pretended to!
For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards.
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
Here's nature, the fabric of things, and the amount of interference you need to make can sometimes be very small.
I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.
I am full of ideas, and I want to have the language to translate that idea and go faster. If you don't really nourish your work, you're at a dead end.
I couldn't expect any of the session people I worked with to go along with my music. They literally fought.
I describe things in terms of body movements. I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that's a good way of talking to musicians. Particularly bass players.
I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
I don't try to make something happen, with the risk of finding myself at a loss.
I don't want it to be just one voice in most cases, I want it to be a group of synchronized voices.
I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.
I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
I get an idea of how the words will fall and what their function be rhythmically, so I start singing or placing the syllables, and they're just nonsense at the beginning. Then certain types of sounds will emerge.
I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
I hate the rock music tradition. I can't bear it!
I hate to be blocked. But I know I won't try to zigzag between difficulties.
I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.
I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
I have these tricks and techniques which were first conceived as a way of defeating self-consciousness about writing lyrics, and because I don't have anything to say in the usual sense.
I imagine in advance the music we could make. What path are we going to take? This one or that one? I need to think about multiple directions.
I often work by avoidance.
I see myself often maneuvering to maintain mobility. My whole kind of selling thing is so uncoordinated and clumsy.
I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
I take sounds and change them into words.
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.
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.
I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
I was aiming for impersonal music, without contrast. This was because the airport music I had heard always had a human voice singing, which I found very irritating.
I went to Africa. I worked with lots of musicians over there, made a lot of recordings in Africa. Back in New York, I had to leave things as they were. This music existed without me.
I'm more into the sort of puppet thing, as if you're strung up somehow.
I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.
I've never really had any expectation for any albums to be hits. I do what I do regardless.
If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.
If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.
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.
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.
In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
Most bands release an album, and then the next one, and then the next one, and there's this linear thing. I still retain the option of moving around.
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.
Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
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.
My lung collapsed. I went into the hospital and didn't play any music for six weeks. It's not very creative.
My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
My position in Roxy Music was always halfway between the musical and the theoretical. I was never the sort of person who could sit down at the piano and hammer out a song.
Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.
One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.
People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.
People wanted to create a sound world using the studio, and not just to tell a story.
Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.
The music sounds very emotional, but the emotions are confused, they're not straightforward: in things that are very uptempo and frenzied, there's nearly always a melancholy edge.
The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
The preoccupations that manifest are not ones that you're necessarily conscious of at any earlier point.
The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
What people call unemotional just doesn't have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.
When I first left Roxy Music, the obvious future was a kind of solo career fronting a band, and I even started trying to do that.
When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.
When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.
When you study music in the classical system, you are always on the inside. When someone is composing a song, they write in C minor, or with a diminished seventh... to offset that, you need a lateral approach.
Zen methods, breaking habits, that makes people mad. My way is the opposite of that. I have always learnt things out of fascination.
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