Musicians From England

"I said to Chris, 'Dude, just hit me. Just hit me because I'm protected here and it's fine.' He's like, 'Are you sure?' I was like, 'Yeah, it will look great. Just go for it."

"I'd like to say that maybe we could work it out But I know that it's no use If I ever find anyone half as good as you I think maybe that will do"

"You should look at your reflection If you wanna see a lie You're heading in the right direction If you wanna pick a side Give me more perfection if you wanna see me cry Oh if you wanna love somebody I'm your guy"

"I never believed from the day that I met you A loser like me could ever get you When we go out I hear people saying "What's that beautiful girl doing with him?""

"I know what you told me I know that it's all over And I know I can't keep calling Just every time I run I keep on falling on you"

"And I wanna kiss you, make you feel alright I'm just so tired to share my nights I wanna cry and I wanna love But all my tears have been used up On another love, another love All my tears have been used up"

"'Cause it's not right I'm magnetised To somebody that don't feel it Love paralyzed She's never gonna need me But sure as the world keeps the moon in the sky She'll keep me hanging on"

"GARDEN OF URANIUM: I moved to a house in Lincolnshire. The government were threatening to dump "low level" nuclear waste about fifteen miles away. The plans were dropped a few months before the last general election. The proposals now seem to have resurfaced somewhere under the North Sea! (among other sites proposed since the election)"

"DESCENDANTS OF SMITH: If we manage to get out the 'back door', the technology available in four million years may perhaps rival the twentieth century christian concept of 'judgement day'. Probably much sooner. Meanwhile, which one is Smith?"

"GOVERNMENT SURPLUS: Employment figures and history books are 'cooked'. Young people are manipulated. The status quo is maintained by an insidious mafiosi piping drugs to the unsuspecting by means of an ever expanding cycloptic media."

"Watford Gap, Watford Gap A plate of grease and a load of crap"

"One of those days in England with a sword in every pond And birds in every garden in the land"

"And you know what? I don't think this little song's gonna make the charts"

"I'm sorry that you thought of us as painful and superfluous But please don't think I'm that thick skinned to want my seed in any old wind I can't believe we'll just exist as figments of each others past Where is it at to get to this, when lawyers lurk where lovers kissed?"

"You ask what is the quality of life Seeking to justify the part you play And mask, what seems a worthless fate"

"And half the blasted idiots are stuck in Yugoslavia With hardly a Dinar And looking no cleaner Than a Chinese wrestler's jock-strap Cooked in chip fat On a greasy day"

"PINCHES OF SALT: Are the humanoids pilling the chemistry into reactions they have no control over? Have the wolves of the universal law already started to blow the door down? Is the back door still open? Who the hell cares with a hundred billion freon - filled hair sprays still on sale? Who am I to ctiticise my own crisis?"

"STILL LIFE: The short British wintertime as seen from within my cocoon. Snow three feet deep in places. Icicles. The small ones outside fighting for survival. Dusk before four. Yellow light in the crisp still. A jackdaw's wing beat precisely preserved. An atmosphere."

"Led Zeppelin recorded the song Hats off to (Roy) Harper. (Led Zeppelin III, 1970)"

"As far as a compassionate lifestyle and [it being] healthy for me, for the planet and all the life on it, vegan is really the best way to go. It helps me a lot. I really believe that I'm doing something good for me and for everyone else every time I eat, you know."

"Being a vegan, caring about animals … all this compassion in my lifestyle is the reward in and of itself."

"Within the context of revolutionary discourse, ideas which do not truly challenge consensual conceits become commodified within the consensual. ... Anything that can be removed from radical discourse will become incorporated and thereby nullified within the consensual narrative. Revolution and its leaders can all too easily become commodity: Che the poster, Sartre ‘le maitre de’. It is in this manner that revolutionary ideas are consumed as product within a construct of moderation calculatedly designed to render them impotent."

"In the hard rock and heavy metal world, Butler is a downright god. Known for his early use of the wah-wah pedal and down-tuning his instrument (which would become a favorite technique among grunge guitarists and bass players), Butler is one of the most celebrated bassists within the genre. Butler, who was also the primary lyricist in Black Sabbath, has been claimed by such greats as Steve Harris, Billy Sheehan, and Jason Newstead when it comes to posing as an influential figure. Butler’s performance on the Sabbath classic "Paranoid" holds the whole song together."

"I went vegetarian when I was about… 8 years old. One day I cut this piece of meat open and blood came out of it, and I realized, I asked my mother, “Where did this come from?,” and she said, “From animals,” and that was it."

"I’ve grown up with animals in the house, I have 3 brothers and 3 sisters, and all of us had cats, dogs, mice, chickens, frogs, tortoises, so they’ve always been a big part of my life. My dog, Scamp, was my best friend when I was growing up, and he was just as much a brother to me as my human brothers. Someone threw acid on him, and he almost died, but my parents spent their life savings having him treated. It appalled me that people could be so cruel, and ever since I have stuck up for animals. It is something I can be active in, unlike trying to figure out the appalling things humans do to each other."

"Ronnie was so enthusiastic, and he could play instruments which Ozzy couldn't play, so it was easy to communicate with him, and for him to communicate musically with us. That enthusiasm gives us all a kick up the bum."

"If the young vegan kids of our nation Are at school and can't get vegan bites, Then the school staff need food education Because safe food are one of our rights."

"There's no vegan who is the greatest Because all you vegans are great, Just like the peace dove You symbolise love, And there is no death on your plate."

"I've got no bodies inside me All of me is me, I will not eat no body else So I am what you see. I do not plan to eat young sheep I will not eat a hen, I'm so proud of what I am I must say once again."

"When I start, I have a story that tends to have a lesson to be learnt. A lot of the time my novels are called novels for young adults and I think one of the reasons they are popular with young adults is because they read them and understand it…"

"I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought. I get angry when I hear that word "empire"; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised."

"As the only black kid in my primary school playground, animals had become my friends. By 15 I was vegan, although I didn't give up honey until 16. For a while my mother thought it was just "a rasta phase"."

"Someone said that Capitalism will eat itself, and I think that’s like the meat industry, the meat industry itself will become dead meat and compassion will reign supreme."

"I can honestly say I've not been tempted to give up veganism in 27 years. I sometimes smell a chip shop and like the smell but then feel guilty because fish might be part of it. But I'll go home and make vegan chips. After all these years, my favourite food is my mother's butter bean stew with whole potatoes, yam and dasheen. I don't think I've ever made a meal for her, to be honest. I think she would consider it a failing of her motherhood and say "Boy, get out the kitchen.""

"One day when I was 11, I asked my mother where did meat come from and she said from the butcher and I said where did the butcher get it from and she said the farmer and I said where did the farmer get it from and she said the cow and I said where did the cow get it from and she said – it is the cow! A shudder went through me! … I read a book about how humans drink milk that was meant for the animals’ young and I decided I wanted to disturb the animal kingdom as little as possible. But it was sometimes difficult to explain why. One day a kid gave me an ice cream and I said I didn’t want it because it had milk in it and milk belonged to babies. ‘You’re a vegan’, he said – and I thought he was calling me a nigger or something so I went to beat him up. He was yelling, ‘No, no, it’s a good thing!’ I was quite proud then because I was the only vegetarian or vegan I knew. … I passionately love life and I understand now how important love is to me. I really think about the true meaning of the word – that and compassion. If I have just one sentence on my tombstone to be remembered by it would be, ‘He tried to love every body’, with everybody as two separate words."

"…Sometimes I’ll do these things for a couple of days then suddenly one day the poem comes out, just like that, in a couple of minutes. I might rewrite it later, a kind of fine tuning, or sometimes I’ll tell the audience it’s a new poem and just perform it to see if it works."

"I have always loved playing around with words. I didn’t know it was called poetry. I was just an innocent kid messing around with words when an adult said ‘You’re a poet, be published or be damned’."

"…So to me it’s not about black, white, Asian, whatever. To me, it’s about literature for everybody, you know. There’s a lot of literature and it should represent us, basically – male, female, whatever kind of nationality or racial background you come from: that’s the kind of literature I want to see in the world and hopefully I’m making my own little contribution."

"When on a long weekend away without the internet on your phone, you realise what's truly important in life. The internet on your phone. - Benson Taylor (2014)"

"The path of progress is the path we take towards our future"."

"The sands of time are sinking The dawn of heaven breaks; The summer morn I've sighed for, The fair, sweet morn, awakes. Dark, dark hath been the midnight, But dayspring is at hand, And glory, glory dwellth In Immanuel's hand"

"Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance He knows that something somewhere has to break He sees the family home now, looming in his headlights The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache Many miles away there's a shadow on the door Of a cottage on the shore Of a dark Scottish lake"

"With one breath, with one flow You will know Synchronicity A sleep trance, a dream dance, A shared romance Synchronicity A connecting principle Linked to the invisible Almost imperceptible Something inexpressible"

"If we share this nightmare Then we can dream Spiritus mundi If you act as you think The missing link Synchronicity"

"The war in the Ukraine is an absurdity, based upon a lie. If we swallow that lie, the lie will eat us. The lie is terrified of the truth."

"We must not lose this battle."

"A star fall, a phone call It joins all Synchronicity It's so deep, it's so wide You're inside Synchronicity Effect without a cause Sub-atomic laws, scientific pause Synchronicity...."

"Mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration But we know all her suicides are fake Daddy only stares into the distance There's only so much more that he can take Many miles away something crawls from the slime At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake"

"The alternative to democracy is a nightmare, a prison, of the mind. That alternative is tyranny. All tyranny is based on a lie. The greater the tyranny, the bigger the lie."

"I know a great deal about Indian music and I have tried to understand its intricacies. I am aware how complex ragas are and how specific the rhythm is. I will spend the rest of my life discovering this wonderful India. I’ve become addicted to it."