Bassists

"We don't need no education We don't need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone Hey! Teacher! Leave them Kids alone!""

"Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream"

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want He makes me down to lie Through pastures green He leadeth me the silent waters by. With bright knives He releaseth my soul. He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places. He converteth me to lamb cutlets, For lo, He hath great power, and great hunger. When cometh the day we lowly ones, Through quiet reflection, and great dedication Master the art of karate, Lo, we shall rise up, And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water.""

"How I wish you were here, We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl year after year. Running over the same old ground, What have we found? The same old fears, Wish you were here."

"All that is now All that is gone All that's to come and everything under the sun is in tune but the sun is eclipsed by the moon."

"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way."

"And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking And racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older Shorter of breath and one day closer to death."

"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way. Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown, Waiting for someone or something to show you the way. Tired of lying in the sunshine, Staying home to watch the rain, You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find, ten years have gone behind you No one told you when to run, You missed the starting gun."

"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be."

"The memories of a man in his old age Are the deeds of a man in his prime. You shuffle in gloom of the sickroom And talk to yourself as you die. Life is a short, warm moment And death is a long cold rest. You get your chance to try in the twinkling of an eye: Eighty years, with luck, or even less.""

"Strangers passing in the street By chance two separate glances meet And I am you and what I see is me."

"And through the window in the wall Comes streaming in on sunlight wings A million bright ambassadors of morning."

"Music seems to help the pain, seems to motivate the brain"

"Witness the man who raves at the wall Making the shape of his question to Heaven Whether the sun will fall in the evening Will he remember the lesson of giving Set the controls for the heart of the sun"

"I could never aspire to Syd's crazed insights and perceptions. In fact for a long time I wouldn't have dreamt of claiming any insights whatsoever. I'll always credit Syd with the connection he made between his personal unconscious and the collective group unconscious. It's taken me 15 years to get anywhere near there. Even though he was clearly out of control when making his two solo albums, some of the work is staggeringly evocative. It's the humanity of it all that's so impressive. It's about deeply felt values and beliefs. Maybe that's what 'Dark Side of the Moon' was aspiring to. A similar feeling.""

"Oh, they [the media] definitely don't want to know the real Barrett story... there are no facts involved in the Barrett story so they can make up any story they like, and they do. There's a vague basis in fact: Syd was in the band and he did write the material on the first album, 80% of it, but that's all. It is only that one album, and that's what people don't realise. That first album, and one track on the second. That's all; nothing else."

"Syd was a genius. But I wouldn't want to go back to playing Interstellar Overdrive for hours and hours."

"Well, he's schizophrenic. And has been since 1968."

"On the club scene we rate about two out of ten and 'Must try harder.' "We've had problems with our equipment and we can't get the P.A. to work because we play extremely loudly. It's a pity because Syd (singer Syd Barrett) writes great lyrics and nobody ever hears them."

"I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this 'we' c--p! Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it. So… blah!"

"It's actually quite emotional, standing up here with these three guys after all these years, standing to be counted with the rest of you. Anyway, we're doing this for everyone who's not here, and particulary of course for Syd"

"I was quite happy standing there thundering about, playing whatever I could - that's "fun". And I see young bands occasionally now doing the same thing. I think it's called "thrash" now. It's the same thing: It's just kids who can't play, pissing about. It's terrific. That's all we were doing. I mean, Dave could play a little bit, but none of the rest of us could."

"Radio One won't play my fucking single ("What God Wants") because they know it's no good. They know it's not as good as Erasure or Janet fucking Jackson. They know that the British public shouldn't be listening to it. It makes my blood boil! If you're not 17 with a baseball hat on back to front, they don't want to know.""

"Andrew Lloyd Webber sickens me. He's in your face all the time and what he does is nonsense. It has no value. It is shallow, derivative rubbish, all of it, and it makes me very gloomy. Actually, I've never been to one of his shows but having put that slightly savage joke on the record, I thought I'd better listen to some Andrew Lloyd Webber and I was staying in a rented house in America this summer and the people who owned the house had a whole bunch of his rubbish so I thought I'd listen to Phantom Of The Opera and I put the record on and I was slightly apprehensive. I thought, Christ, I hope this isn't good - or even mediocre. I was not disappointed. Phantom Of The Opera is absolutely fucking horrible from start to finish."

"It was very, very hard work organizing that Wall concert but everyone was fabulous to work with - Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, bloody brilliant. All brilliant. Except for Sinead O'Connor... She doesn't understand anything. She's just a silly little girl. You can't just lie in the corner and shave your bloody head and stick it up your arse and occasionally pull it out to go (_"brogue"_) 'Oh, I tink this is wrong and dat is wrong' and burst into tears."

"Well, anyway, I am one of the best five writers to come out of English music since the War."

"I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien culture seeing the death of this planet - coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around; finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why our end came before its time and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death."

"Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records. So, when I left Pink Floyd, I guess I had two, no three choices open to me: Not to do it anymore, which is daft as I was writing songs, although I suppose I could have written for other people, but I like making records; so I could either do it as Roger Waters or I could have got together with other people and said hey, why don't we start a band? But my view of bands had been jaundiced slightly by my previous experience, so I think that was something I never considered."

"I have nothing against Dave Gilmour furthering his own goals. It's just the idea of Dave's solo career masquerading as Pink Floyd that offends me!"

"Earlier this year we went skiing and I was in a shop, paying a bill and there was a woman standing there whom I knew slightly. I was waiting for my bill and she was buying something, a tea strainer. Quite suddenly she said to me, 'Where was your Father killed?'. I was very surprised and blurted out 'Oh Anzio'. Now this is a woman of about my age, so she's 40-ish. She said, 'My Father was killed in the war'. Apparently somebody lent her a copy of The Final Cut and she had listened to the whole thing and she had found it very moving. In fact she said it had moved her to tears. She told me this, standing in the shop, with some effort I suspect, and I remember thinking: That's enough really. It doesn't matter if the Americans don't buy it."

"Oh, for fuck sake stop lighting off fireworks and shouting & screaming I'm trying to sing a song! I mean I don't care. If you don't want to hear it. You know fuck you. I'm sure there are a lot of people here who do want to hear it. So why don't you just be quiet. If you want to light your fireworks off go outside and light them off out there and if you want to shout and scream well then go and do it out there.... but. I am trying to sing a song that some people want to listen to. I want to listen to it."

"In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all."

"It's like saying 'Give a man a Les Paul guitar and he becomes Eric Clapton,' you know. It's not true. And give a man an amplifier and a synthesizer, and he doesn't become whoever, you know. He doesn't become us."

"We've got the recording side together and not the playing side."

"For us the most important thing is to be visual, and for the cats watching us to have fun. This is all we want. We get very upset if people get bored when we're only half way through smashing the second set. Then all of a sudden they hear Arnold Layne and they flip all over again."

"I think that happiness resides somewhere between the extremes of personal, religious, and political. I think happiness resides where we understand someone else's point of view and needs. Happiness resides where we are not lost in the solitary dream.""

"The very early days of Pink Floyd were magical. We played small auditoriums for entranced audiences, and there was a wonderful sense of communion. We got overpowered by the weight of success and numbers — not just the money but the size of the audience. I became very disenchanted. I had to make the choice of staying on the treadmill or making the braver decision to travel a more difficult path alone."

"What it comes down to for me is: Will the technologies of communication and culture — and especially popular music, which is a vast and beloved enterprise — help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?"

"I’m not a huge practicing Christian myself, but it just staggers me that people who claim to be can stand up and spout – like your president George [H.W.] Bush – can stand up and spout this bullshit about God supporting one side over another in war, which is why I wrote the lyrics of the song "What God Wants": "God wants crusade/God wants Jihad." Well it may well be that God doesn’t want either of those things. They’re manifestations of the insecurities of the Muslim and Christian communities. I hate when someone uses religion to bolster war in the world: it's extremely disgusting and offensive for me, and for all christians, because that was not what Christ was trying to teach.""

"Asked what his artistic purpose was: "There is no purpose. We do whatever we do. You either blow your brains out or get on with something.""

"Oh thou that bowest Thy ecstatic face Thy perfect sorrows Are the world's to keep Wherefore onto thy knees Come we With a prayer"

"I thought I could organize freedom How Scandinavian of me"

"If travel is searching And home what's been found I'm not stopping I'm going hunting I'm the hunter I'll bring back the goods But I don't know when"

"I'm a fountain of blood In the shape of a girl … Leave me now, return tonight Tide will show you the way If you forget my name You will go astrayLike a killer whaleTrapped in a bay"

"I'm back at my cliff Still throwing things off I listen to the sounds they make On their way down I follow with my eyes 'til they crash Imagine what my body would sound like Slamming against those rocks And when it lands Will my eyes Be closed or open?"

"His wicked sense of humour suggests exciting sex His fingers focus on her Her touches He's Venus as a boy"

"There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic To human behaviour … There's no map And a compass Wouldn't help at all"

"You know, it's ironic that just at the point the lawyers and the businessmen had calculated how to control music, the Internet comes along and fucks everything up." Björk gives the finger again, this time waving it into the air. "God bless the Internet," she adds. And what about you, then? "I'll still be there, waving a pirate flag."

"The thing about making [Dancer in the Dark] that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I can't take it, because I'm pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said, 'What did you expect? All major directors are sexist; a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female–male equality.' My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick, and still they are the one[s] that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier's case it is not so, and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming, and hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up [so] that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this 'soul-robbery'. Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that."

"It's a big question. Getting rid of religion would be a good start, wouldn't it? It seems to be causing a lot of havoc."