People From Liverpool

"Defensive displays, and this is just blowing it completely out the water. Nil, seven! I know! Thank? Thankfully, a couple of the people have scored a couple of times. So, they just put the number next to them. Otherwise, there's no space."

"Well? I hope the people in the United States are sitting, enjoying this game. Because, they will never see a World Cup semi-final like this. For the rest of their lives. I am shell-shocked!"

"But, they need a goal or two double quick."

"We all fancied Germany today, we didn't think it was going to be this easy."

"Yeah. We're in a special place, Ian. We've seen some football matches in our time. But, I've never seen? Seen a game like this, or been in a spectacle like this. I'll remember this for the rest of my life. Yeah, yeah. You'd much rather see seven goals than a one-nil defensive display, wouldn't you? At least they're getting entertained."

"Whenever they start defending. Mats Hummels brings the ball twenty yards, and then? I think it's David Luiz dives out of the challenge with him. You're four-nil down! Go and be aggressive and kick somebody! Go and do something to influence this game!"

"Again! Oh, what can you say? Fernandino, or is it Luiz Gustavo? Gets for? I think it's Fernandinho. But, what a lovely goal. Fernandinho. Yes it helps, when you're three-nil up. But, what a pass by Sami Khedira! Talk about mentally strong, cold as ice. Puts it on a proverbial plate for Toni Kroos to get his second of the game."

"Yeah. Look at the space, Ian! Look at the space! Oh, great strike. But, look at this Ian. How bad is that? Simple, no? Ugh! Yes, he gets a bit lucky. That's a lovely strike by Toni Kroos. But is anybody going to close down? Is anybody going to be, make it hard to beat? Are they going to be organized, Brazil? Because at the moment it looks as if eleven players are just running around the field with no idea. Yeah."

"Simple as you like. Look at this with the goal. Lovely ball in, Toni Kroos takes his time. Look at this for the pass. Have some of that. Intelligence of Muller. Julio Cesar does well, but Klose is there for the rebound. What a beautiful goal, simple. Running off the ball, incisive passes. Brazil have to watch out; they've already been warned. They're going to go down by a lot more if they continue like this. But, a wonderful achievement by Miroslav Klose."

"It's hard to decipher this game. It's been a very good German performance, but Ian? You cannot underestimate how bad Brazil have been today, it's like? It's like amateur hour watching them. But, their attitude has just been appalling. I know, I keep saying appalling. Because, I'm running out words. They've just given in. They've just completely given in, actually trying to run around and play football."

"Yeah, they're just too good. But also, this is the worst I've seen Brazil play and start a game. Yes they've started slow in other games, Ian. But, I've never seem them so disorganized. At least France in the quarter-final were nice and tight and compact to try to stop the Germans playing football. Brazil are just all over the place, so open."

"That's a Sunday morning goal; it's certainly Sunday morning defending. Simple as you'd like, thank you very much! What a present!"

"We're ten minutes into the game, nearly eleventh minute. There's lots of space already on the field. Brazil have to come a little bit tighter, Ian. They can't be so expansive, from back to front. Otherwise? The Germans will cut them to shreds."

"Dad wasn’t there much cos he had three or four jobs. First he was away at sea, later on he worked as an insurance salesman in the day and on a building site in the evening."

"Paul and Holly would rather hang out in the Café Tabac or the Armadillo Tea Rooms where everyone sits around going 'Oh, Andy Warhol, yah', pretending it’s London. [instead of the burger joint where the interview is taking place]"

"He was a skinhead and I thought, ‘Oooh! He’s weird!’ He had this blond skinhead cut with ‘Psycho’ sprayed in black on his head. I hated that. He was wild but he’s not any more. He’s been tamed by age."

"I do sometimes write songs that don’t seem right for Frankie so they get filed away. But don’t worry - anything good will be used. I’m not that gifted that I can afford to throw away any good stuff."

"Coming back doing interviews is weird. It’s like an actor who takes a year off and just goes home, settles down, does some gardening, wakes up in the morning, worries about what to have for breakfast, then suddenly you’re plonked back in the middle of it all."

"I got great voice training in St. Mary’s Church, Wavertree, in Liverpool, when I was a lad. Dressing up in cassocks was all part of the fun. I used to earn sixpence a week and although I don’t go to church very much any more, 'Once In Royal David’s City' is still my favourite hymn."

"When Frankie Goes To Hollywood were still going strong, we made a point of being as Spinal Tap as possible. Yes, we had food fights. Yes, items were thrown out of hotel windows. But one childish prank I liked at the time was when we stayed in those really posh hotels where, at night, you could put your shoes out and in the morning they’ve been cleaned. We amused ourselves by roaming the corridors at night and having a crap in each pair of shoes we found. We even made bets: whoever filled the most shoes, won."

"We are here to stir things up. Even people that hate us have to admit that we’ve already succeeded in doing that. Love Frankie or hate it - that’s what we want - a strong reaction."

"Often the raw ideas like ‘Relax’ and ‘Rage Hard’ - are the best. ‘Rage Hard’ just happened. There was little conscious effort."

"[I was] a little boy with a patch over one eye, who sang and danced along the street. I had what’s called a lazy eye, so I had to wear the patch. You tend to be a prodded kind of kid when you look like that, but it makes you much stronger in the end."

"I’m very lucky. I have terrific parents, but some kids have a really rotten time growing up and we should do all that we can to make their lives happier and more secure."

"You used to get people writing in to the Liverpool Echo saying, ‘Who is this Martian walking round town?’ I used to get battered. Going out for lunch was like running the gauntlet."

"I was in Big In Japan between '77 and '78. Then I went solo, releasing a couple of singles. Then I joined the Dancing Girls who turned into the Sons Of Egypt who were then whittled down into Frankie Goes To Hollywood."

"Showbiz is a very strange thing, I’ve got a love-hate relationship with that. In Liverpool your mates say, ‘You’re there, Holly, you’re there’ but they only see the end product, not what that entails."

"The name Holly was given me by a girl called Yvonne Petrovitch because of the Andy Warhol connection with the transvestite Holly Woodlawn."

"Lord Fancourt: Look here, am I any relation to him? Jack: No; you're Charley's Aunt, from Brazil. Lord Fancourt: Brazil! Where's that? Jack: You know–er–where the nuts come from."

"Again I come back, why is USADA which is really a nefarious locals drugs agency in the United States so intent? Now I can tell you one thing. And I could prove it in SA but I, I went to, I met a chap who worked with Armstrong, err, on Saturday in Boulder Colorado. And he told me that he had a visit, two years ago, err to tell, and the question was, they were agents from a particular agency and, er, they said “will you tell us that Lance Armstrong took EPO? And we could assure that you will never want for money again“. That was his quote on Thursday and he told them in words I can’t put on radio what to do with that and they said “I think we’re talking to the wrong man” and they walked away."

"I'm still very skeptical about the whole thing. The Laboratory (Châtenay-Malabry) is unscrupulous to say the least, because they shouldn't know the sample they're testing.” The fact that the lab knew whose sample it was testing is just one of the “anomolies” It's time for the second test, the so-called “B” sample, be done in a second country by a second lab. I'm not saying the lab is a crooked lab, they have proved to us that they're not a particularly scrupulous lab. I got a feeling he's not telling lies."

"He told me in a private situation, when I wasn’t working as a journalist. I was sat in the bedroom some years ago, and I asked him point blank, ‘look Lance, the way I talked you up on television, I would have to back off and resign if you one day went positive’. And he looked at me and he said ‘man I’ve seen death in the face and I don’t take drugs.’ And that’s all he said. I have no reason to disbelieve him."

"Myriads of individuals, each one unique, live out their lives in rapt intercourse with one another, contribute their heart’s pulses to the universal music, and presently vanish, giving place to others. All this age-long sequence of private living, which is the actual tissue of humanity’s flesh, I cannot describe. I can only trace, as it were, the disembodied form of its growth."

"Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos."

"You can imagine that it is not easy to describe this modern vision of the nature of things in any manner intelligible to those who have not our advantages. There is much in this vision which will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies."

"The Seventh Men were completely without interest in the universal and the unseen. The beauty which they sought to create was ephemeral and very largely sensuous. And they were well content that it should be so. Personal immortality, said a dying sage, would be as tedious as an endless song."

"Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the universal view than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man’s true function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of all these? Or was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the cosmos? These grave questions I would answer."

"This kind of internal "telepathic" intercourse, which was to serve me in all my wanderings, was at first difficult, ineffective, and painful. But in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host with vividness and accuracy, while yet preserving my own individuality, my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only when the other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special act of volition, keep particular thoughts secret from me."

"I spent on the Other Earth many "other years," wandering from mind to mind and country to country, but I did not gain any clear understanding of the psychology of the Other Men and the significance of their history till I encountered one of their philosophers, an aging but still vigorous man whose eccentric and unpalatable views had prevented him from attaining eminence."

"Nations appeared, and all the phobias that make up nationalism."

"Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty. Moreover, while the decades pass, no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of our social order. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration."

"I can only point out that, the higher a mind’s development, the more it discovers in the universe to occupy it."

"The finds were of extreme interest to the Second Men, but not in the manner which the Siberian party had intended, not as a store of scientific and philosophic truth, but as a vivid historical document. The view of the universe which the tablets recorded was both too naïve and too artificial; but the insight which they afforded into the mind of the earlier species was invaluable."

"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars."

"The sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacreous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake."

"The great world to which I am native has long ago outgrown the myths, the toys, the bogies of your infant world. There, one lives without the fear of death and pain, though there one dies and suffers. There, one knows no lust to triumph over other men, no fear of being enslaved. There one loves without craving to possess, worships without thought of salvation, contemplates without pride of spirit. There one is free as none in your world is free, yet obedient as none of you is obedient."

"Little by little it became evident that those who used great gifts, and even genius, to establish the truth of the after life, or to seek contact with their beloved dead, suffered from a strange blindness, and obtuseness of the spirit."

"Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time within which it can repeat itself."

"Very seldom, only in rare moments of clarity, only after ages of misapprehension, did a few of them, here and there, now and again, begin to have the deeper insight into the world’s nature and man’s. And no sooner had this precious insight begun to propagate itself, than it would be blotted out by some small or great disaster, by epidemic disease, by the spontaneous disruption of society, by an access of racial imbecility, by a prolonged bombardment of meteorites, or by the mere cowardice and vertigo that dared not look down the precipice of fact."

"Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another."