Composers From England

"(Imitating a Belarus citizen commenting on their national flag) Stupid National Anthem....Look at this flag; Two bears fighting over a pineapple. What kind of message does that send to the world? "Come to Belarus, where wild animals will steal your fruit""

"Hey, ASDA, I ain't gonna be your bitch!"

"And if it all goes horribly wrong we've still got Argos. Don't you just love Argos? With the Laminated Book of Dreams. You know why it's laminated don't you? To catch the tears of joy! (mimes turning pages, crying) "So many beautiful things! I cannot possess them all! Quick, stock check! Beep beep beep". It's like the ultimate betting shop, isn't it? The tiny little pens, the slips of paper, but everyone is a winner! And then you have the staff there, the pale mythical wardens of the treasure."

"Even if you’re not particularly religious, then you have to admit that religion surrounds us even in the most mundane aspects of our lives. I was trying to rent a car, and the bloke said to me: "You’re not covered for acts of God."I said: "What do you mean by that?", he said: [waving arms] "Woooooh!"I said, "Can you be a bit more specific?", and he went, [vaguely gesticulating] "Eh... ooooh... uh?"I said, "I’m intrigued because you said 'acts of God', and not gods, or spirits, or jinn, or nymphs, but 'God', a capital God, a monotheistic religion, maybe a Judeo-Christian religion, which would imply a belief system, which would perhaps lead to free-will and determinism, so logically anything that man does directly or indirectly is in fact an act of God, so I’m not covered for anything!"He said, "I’ll get the manager."Then I said, "What do you mean by an act of God? What do you mean by that?"He said, "I dunno, a plague of locusts or something.""'A plague of locusts'? They swarm round the vehicle, rip the wing mirrors off, and I’m liable for a fifty pound excess?”And he said, "No, like, rain or something."I said, "Yeah, but how much rain? It’s drizzling a bit now, is that an act of God? At what point does the rain reach a certain level beyond which it takes on the more apocalyptic mantle of the water-based punishment of the Lord!?"And he said, [despairing] "I just work Saturdays."I said "You can’t answer me, can you? Your policy is riddled with theological inconsistency. You disgust me. You twist and turn. You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly-convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralysing venom, and the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing: [imitating spider] 'Siberian spider have good leg, have nice day, can catch fly, can make web, can catch fly for family, I can do nothing, my leg, it drags behind! It drags! [audience laughs] And you laugh! You make fun! Oh, ha, big joke! I am failure! I am freak! [singing] But in my dreams I can fly, I'm the greatest spider in town. But I wake and it's cold, and I feel so old, and my legs are dragging me down.'"And then the manager came out, and he said: “Stop all that spider singing." Pointed to a sign on the wall: a spider with a line through it. "Oh, fair enough."He said "I can offer you an upgrade, fifty quid, and we can include in it policies set in place by the Marquis de Laplace, the French scientist who declared that all things in the universe are predetermined, so you would be covered even if time-travel was invented during the period of rental.”I said, "Nah, probably leave it.""

"[Singing as U2, in Irish accent] Hello! Some old Celtic bollocks!"

"Talking of tough gigs, I saw a very tough gig in New York, it was Whitney Houston. She was doing this open-air gig in New York. It was in the winter, and it was like minus eight degrees, in Lincoln Plaza. She was meant to be on at three, there were about three-thousand people there. Ten past three, no sign of Whitney. Half past three, crowd getting a bit grumpy, a bit restless. Eventually, four o'clock, Whitney sashays onto the stage in a fur coat. She comes up to the microphone, she says "I just want to say I love every single one of you." And this huge black guy next to me says "Sing, bitch!". Tough crowd."

"Milton Keynes: Satan's lay-by."

"You get somebody to explain the Trinity to you, they'll say "Well God, he's God, and Jesus is God as well, and the Holy Spirit is...[mumbles indistinctly]". "What?" "He's the fecund spirit of the Lord who impregnates Mary, then gets a bit up himself and is reduced to light clerical duties?" Let's examine that in joke form: three male divine natures go into a cosmic essence, giving and receiving love, but not in a gay bishop way, to which the whole of Islam goes "Wha?"; Hinduism: "Nah!"; or Buddhism: "Ssh!"."

"Three blind mice walk into a pub. But they are unaware of their surroundings, so to derive humour from it would be exploitative."

""God save our gracious Queen": Why would we invoke a non-specific deity to bail out these unelected spongers? [Audience wildly applauds]"

"The reason we'd stopped was that the buffet car was on fire, that was the reason we stopped. One of the giant biscuits spontaneously combusted out of boredom. Whoever was charged with making the announcement momentarily lost all sense of procedure and we got this tantalizing glimpse into the chaos on the trains, and all we could hear was (bangs on microphone) "Gary, it's burning, what we gonna do?!" And everyone on the carriage just cheered, "Hooray! We're rubbish!""

"I'm English, and as such I crave disappointment. I actively seek it out."

"[as George W. Bush] I will tame evil, I will get the evil ones, We must find the evil ones. We must get evil, we must laminate evil, we must wear it round our necks, at the backstage party in paradise!"

"Anyway, beards and drugs leads me neatly to the Taliban; were they really that backward, or were they the finest minds of the fourteenth century? Nobody seems to know or care. That ideology was never going to work, was it? It was just cobbled together from different beliefs: The anti-intellectualism of the Khmer Rouge, the religious persecution of the Nazis, the enforced beard-wearing from the world of folk music, and the segregation and humiliation of women from the world of golf."

"(After asking the audience about their negative experiences with Marijuana)BB: So, what form did these experiences take?Audience Member: Swimming with dolphins! (mentioned earlier on the show)BB: (misunderstands) Dolby? What, you hear everything with a slightly reduced hiss? (As Audience Member) I like to hear the world in Dolby, it's fantastic! Mind you, it means that no snake will I ever hear. And I said that in a very strange way. [As Yoda] No snake will I ever hear, mmm! [Normally] Never put Dolby on snake detectors, that's what we must remember."

"There's more evil in the charts than in an Al-Qaeda suggestion box."

"There’s this one celebrity, Rosie O’Donnell, a talk show host, and she said this: “I don’t know anything about Afghanistan, but I know it’s full of terrorists, speaking as a mother.” So what is this "speaking as a mother" then? Is that a euphemism for "talking out of my arse"? "Suspending rational thought for a moment"? As a rational human being, Al-Qaeda are a loose association of psychopathic zealots who could be rounded up with a sustained police investigation. But speaking as a parent, they’re all eight foot tall, they’ve got lasers under their moustaches, a huge eye in their foreheads and the only way to kill them is to NUKE every country that hasn’t sent us a Christmas card in the the last 20 years!! "Speaking as a mother"."

"I can't ever remember ever seeing any charity porn, though. "Farmyard Frolics 3: A portion of this goes to a women's literacy programme in Eritrea"."

"Talking of white supremacist violent types, I was in America, recently... [Wild laughter and applause from audience]"

"You're absolutely right, Hitler was a vegetarian. It's very unseemly to think so, but there he was. Just goes to show, vegetarianism, not always a good thing. Can in some extreme cases lead to genocide."

"I'm a vegetarian. I'm not strict; I eat fish, and duck. Well, they're nearly fish, aren't they? They're semi-submerged a lot of the time, they spend a lot of time in the water, they're virtually fish, really. And pigs, cows, sheep, anything that lives near water, I'm not strict. I'm sort of like a post-modern vegetarian; I eat meat ironically."

"[responding to scattered audience applause] Ah, lovely: the ripple, the ripple there. That's nearly the Zen clap of acceptance there, wasn't it?"

"But we won't have any genetically modified food, oooh no, we won't have any GM. Which is a shame, I think we've missed a trick there. We could develop wheat with the properties of Velcro... to catch whatever it is that's forming those crop circles! But then the spaceship would have to have the corresponding Velcro, so it's a bit of a long shot."

"My first job was selling doors, door to door. That's a tough job isn't it? Bing Bong; Hello, can I interest you in a- oh shit you've got one already haven't you? Well never mind..."

"Three blokes go into a pub. One of them is a little bit stupid, and the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability. [seems to drift off in a daydream out of disenchantment, then comes back]"

"It's not a beard, it's an animal I've trained to sit very still."

"Marijuana? It's harmless really, unless you fashion it into a club and beat somebody over the head with it. 'Beards' (track 12) 5:29"

"When I was a child, I was terrified by this. (plays theme from The Magic Roundabout ) It was very sinister, wasn't it? It just went on and on, like Dante's seventh circle of Hell. I recently found out there was a secret middle section deemed unsuitable for small children. There's about four hours of this, then it all starts to go a bit weird. (plays discordant music) (Booming echoing voice) I am Zebedee, lord of the woods! Bow down snail, I have dominion! Ch. 38, 1:24:37"

"This is a song inspired by the work of Phil Collins; the nasty, whining little git. Ch. 36, 1:18:46"

"BB: Are there any men in? (no response) BB: Any women? Female voices: Yes! BB: Ah, you see, there's this crisis in masculine identity at the moment. Women, totally at home with their sexuality. 'I am woman, wo-man, I, wo-MAN.' Men 'Er.. (awkward expression) Someone else'll shout out, I'll be alright'. Alright, is there any blokes in? Masculine voices: Yeah! BB: You see, there's a term that men feel more comfortable with. Bloke, blokey bloke bloke. It's a kind of friendly term. 'Oh, he's a bloke, lovely bloke, nice bloke, blokey bloke. I'm a bloke, you're a bloke, wahey!' It doesn't impose any unnecessary demands on us as men. 'Bloke', that's just basically 'carry stuff, don't get in the way'. 'Man', that's all kinds of other things, isn't it? That's nobility, gallantry, wisdom... that conjures up some image of a bloke in a cardigan with a pipe saying 'Cover up those table legs, mother, they're inflaming my sexual ardour'. Ch. 24, 53:21"

"A lot of people say there's a fine line between genius and insanity. I don't think there's a fine line, I actually think there's a yawning gulf. You see some poor bugger scuffling up the road with balloons tied to his ears, he's not going home to invent a rocket, is he?"

"Aldous Huxley took the drug mescaline and then chronicled his experience in the book The Doors of Perception. Now, I don't actually think that's the first thing he wrote: he probably wrote 'my brain is melting' ten thousand times, but it was the book that the critics latched on to."

"Nostalgia: How long's that been around?"

"Toughest job I ever had: selling doors, door to door."

"I am a confectionary-based existentialist."

"Three blokes go into a pub. Something happens. The outcome was hilarious! Episode 1, 1:36"

"Three blokes go into a pub. Well, I say three; could be four or five. Could be nine or ten, doesn't matter. Could have been fifteen, twenty - fifty. Round it up. Hundred. Let's go mad, eh - two-fifty. Tell you what, double it up - five hundred. Thousand! Oh, I've gone mad! Two thousand! Five thousand! (adopting auctioneer persona) Anyone? Five thousand, six thou, six thousand, ten thousand! Small town in Hertfordshire goes into a pub! Fifteen thousand blokes! Alright, let's go - population of Rotterdam. The Hague. Whole of Northern Holland. Mainland U.K. Let's go all the way to the top - Europe, alright? Whole of Europe goes - I say Europe. Could be Eurasia. Not the band, obviously, that's just two of them. Alright, continents - North America! Plus South America! Plus Antartica - that's just eight blokes in a weather station. Not a good example. Alright, make it a lot simpler, all the blokes on the planet go into the pub, right? And the first bloke goes up to the bar and he says "I'll get these in." What an idiot!"

"Who photographs kebabs?"

"And just as he said that a feminist jumped out of a manhole - just jumped up and oh, and she didn't like that. That she didn't like that."

"But our country's equivalent of gritty reality is more like "Look out Sarge, he's got a shooter!""

"I'm quite lucky, because I've got a small, decorative concrete pig."

"What I'd like to do now - well, what I'd like to do now is grow my beard very long, weave it into my pubes and strum it like a harp."

"All middle men are bad."

"You rarely find a song written in an odd meter that feels so groove [in "Money"]. Honestly, the main riff feels like 4/4, despite being in 7/4. Only Roger Waters can come up with something like that."

"The concert in question, which took place in Berlin, contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust. The artist in question has a long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people."

"You are anti-Semitic to your rotten core [...] Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac."

"If the immediate association you make to last year’s killing of an Al Jazeera reporter [Shireen Abu Akleh] by an Israeli soldier in Jenin is to the death of a Jewish girl [Anne Frank] in a German concentration camp in 1945, if you can't find in all that has happened in the 77 years between those two deaths a better comparison of victimhood, then you don’t have a problem with Israel. You have a problem with Jews. The feat of logical gymnastics performed by Waters – at once both equating Jews to monstrous Nazis and belittling the Nazi wholesale extermination of Jews – is such a classic antisemitic move that it should not need even explaining."

"I hate the word "artist," but I would definitely concede that Roger is a great artist ... as well as a total obsessive and psychiatrist's dream."

"Francesca Albanese is the good"

"[Asked if he has ever changed his mind on a topic.] Yes, an article I wrote about three months ago calling Vladimir Putin a gangster… That may have been unfair [...] It may be that he's leading his country to the benefit of all of the people of Russia."