Musicians From England

"We are a parliamentary democracy; we don’t function by plebiscite. It’s dangerous. I don’t believe in referendums – Hitler and Mussolini organised referendums"

"Democracy is under attack. It's under attack in every country in the world. It's in grave danger of being lost unless we defend it."

"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."

"Dissent is a legitimate and essential right in any democracy and modern politicians must accept this fact with tolerance. A sense of proportion — and a sense of humour — is a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness."

"Jung believed there was a large pattern to life, that it wasn't just chaos. Our song Synchronicity II is about two parallel events that aren't connected logically or causally, but symbolically."

"Disagree with the tyrant and you risk imprisonment, torture and death. Yet that is what we must do, all of us. We must protect our right to speak the truth."

"I heard a John McLaughlin record and it was all like acoustic guitar, and it was jazzy, and I was like 'oh yeah yeah yeah'. That's weird, but appropriate for an opening act, you know, with acoustic guitar. And we'll come out blast away, and the Byrds will come out with a million hits. The second gig was in Cortland, and I made the mistake of watching them, and I ran back to the dressing room, and I said, 'you guys gotta see this guys', and so we all watched, murmuring like, 'Oh my God, they're like monsters. They're just like'. It was crazy, it was like, 'oh my'. It just made us seem like we were caught between technicians that were way beyond us and non-technicians who had like a million hits."

"I don't relate to all this in exactly the same way that John [McLaughlin] does and yet we all meet at the same points eventually, can't find a label for it, but I know what it is when I get there. It's funny, you know, sometimes the way I experience the music is with a total involvement with doing feel the music getting better and better, and gradually it becomes like a light at the end of a hallway, and I just want to get there as quickly as I can to see where it's going to go."

"What John McLaughlin did with the electric guitar set the world on its ear. No one ever heard an electric guitar played like that before, and it certainly inspired me. ...John's band, more than my experience with Miles, led me to want to turn the volume up and write music that was more dramatic and made your hair move."

"A musician is like an ear for humanity, just as a painter is like an eye for humanity. The sounds somehow exist in a different sphere, the musician listens, and brings them out for the world. There's the mystery: that someone can hear something that is essentially soundless and make it into sound."

"John McLaughlin. He's the one, that's the killer. You might hear anything; that's because John has the knowledge."

"I practice all the scales. Everyone should know lots of scales. Actually, I feel there are only scales. What is a chord, if not the notes of a scale hooked together? There are several reasons for learning scales: one, the knowledge will unlock the neck for you -- you'll learn the instrument; second, if I say I want you to improvise ofer Gmaj7+5, then go to Eaug9-5, then to bmaj7-5 --well, if you don't know, what those chords are in scale terms, you're lost. It's not all that difficult, but you have to be ready to apply yourself..."

"There's no record industry, and so musicians I know, because I get mail from young musicians, I mean, they're really just struggling to survive, because they're not gonna get a record contract! So what are they doing? To survive? Like I did? I mean, okay I drove trucks, and sold caviar and repaired instruments just to survive. But in the end, you know, I'm in the studio, you know, recording rock music, pop music, whatever! Whatever gives me money to put in my, you know, food in my mouth. And so there's a lot of great musicians today, they're just looking for a gig! And what are the gigs that are going around? The gigs with pop bands or with smooth jazz, funky jazz, you know, a lot of this kind of cliched music. I'm sorry to criticize it like that, but I grew up with Tony (Williams) and you know Miles (Davis), (John) Coltrane, and real things, where there's blood all over the floor, blood all over the stage, that's what the passion's all about."

"...The music was evolving with society, and society, if you recall, there was a narcissism that entered society in the 80s. Saturday Night Fever, you know, hey! This whole LOOK, the LOOK about things, and the look almost became more important of the content..."

"Whether people accept this music or not, I don’t give a damn. I know how good—and right—the group is. We all sell out to a point. And don’t get me wrong, I like living comfortably and having a nice car. But if money determines your art, then what’s the point?"

"For me, I can still say music is God, music is the face of God. That's everybody, that's the hearts of men. And that's important to me. But that's not the way everybody sees it. And, of course, what happened in interviews, especially in collective interviews, was that people would ask me questions and I would talk about development and ideals, about which I already have talked too much this afternoon, and these questions would be posed to the other musicians and they would say, "We don't want to feel that way at all, we're not into that.""

"An audience is just a mirror of what's happening on stage, and if what's happening on stage has love in it—real feeling and conviction and strength and purity—then we are truly reflecting them, because it is their own nature that is coming back. Everything is. The music is. For me, the only barriers in music are the barriers in the musician and in the equipment he has to use. If a musician has no barriers within himself, then there are no barriers within his music. His only battle is with the problems of expressing his true nature against the difficulties of the real world—the limits of his amplifiers and his guitar or his piano or whatever, the limits the outer world places upon the natural perfection of the spirit."

"Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process."

"As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one."

"My friend Peter Schmidt used to talk about ‘not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing’, which is an inverse process – where you leave out an assumption that everybody has always made and see what happens (e.g. music has to be made of intentionally produced sounds was the assumption that Cage left out). In that version of this process, you discover a value in the absence of something ­– in fact you discover that the absence of something is the revelation of something else (Buñuel, the film-maker, said, "Every object conceals another" – a message that I often relay in the studio when overdubbing starts)."

"The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions."

"Ideas worth questioning: "Being an artist is a job for life.""

"Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable [sic] as it is interesting."

"Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours."

"A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist. To some extent, this was how ambient music emerged. My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to, not because I wanted a job as a musician. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist. It's like having a ready-made formula if you are able to read it. One of the innovations of ambient music was leaving out the idea that there should be melody or words or a beat… so in a way that was music designed by leaving things out – that can be a form of innovation, knowing what to leave out. All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid 1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real."

"Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations."

"When you see people like Ken Loach, David Miller, Jackie Walker, when you see those people being accused of antisemitism, you cannot help but say this is all made up."

"If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result."

"At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly.""

"I, I wish you could swim Like the dolphins Like dolphins can swim Though nothing, nothing will keep us together We can beat them, forever and ever Oh, we can be heroes just for one day."

"The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz."

"We broke up mostly because we didn't have a manager and everyone was on different drugs. I don't take them so it was a bit weird for me."

"It ain't the size of the dog in the fight, It's the size of the fight in the dog on the day or the night"

"We started out to finish groups like U2 - that was what it was all about. And they're still the biggest band in the world, so we failed. We didn't really do anything, people wore flares for a year or two, d'you know what I mean? That's all we did."

"I programmed all the drums and synths, while he played all the guitars. The initial plan was just to demo his songs because he was out of his UA deal, so we pumped it to people like Island and Virgin and they loved it. It was signed to Island, but Simon Draper of Virgin heard it and called me to talk about their band, the Human League. They'd done demos of The Sound of the Crowd and Love Action in a Sheffield studio, but Simon didn't think they were getting the punch they needed. He loved the drums on Homosapien and asked me to do a track. So the band turned up at Genetic with their multi-track for The Sound of the Crowd. Simon had conned them and told them that I'd mix it! I said, 'We're going to start again and do it better'. There were a few grumbles, but by the time we'd finished, they were really pleased."

"I’d got all this new technology and we spent a year making the album, programming all these primitive computers. [The LinnDrum] sounded so much like real drums it was difficult to tell it apart. The tempo was absolutely precise because it all ran to a digital clock and the record just was precision itself. It was also very simple. If you actually analyse what was going on at any given moment in time there may be only four or five things going on, but it does the job.""

"They came up and we did Sound Of The Crowd. They were under the impression that I was going to work on what they’d done so far and improve that and carry on. I said, ‘No, I’m not doing that, we’re starting again’, which was a bit of a shock for Phil. He argued about that but I said, ‘No, if I’m going to produce you, you’re going to do what I tell you to do. I will listen to your arguments and consider them, and if I still think I’m right we do it my way or it’s the highway. This is my attitude to everybody I produce, it’s a sort of democratic dictatorship!""

""We were just making a record and suddenly it just exploded all over the world and has since become a legendary record. It’s just mad! If somebody had told me then ‘Do you realise that you are making history with this record?’ I’d have said, ‘Yeah alright, calm down and have a cup of tea’."

"He was an extraordinary bloke. First of all he was very funny. He was straight but very camp. [He] came in and Visconte said, ‘Right, what are we doing?’. He said: ‘Well I haven’t got any material, I’ve just got one guitar riff’. So he played us this guitar riff. It sounded a bit like Chuck Berry to me but I didn’t say anything. He went out with the band and after two hours he said, ‘Right, got a song’. So we recorded it and took a few takes. He then said, ‘Right I’ve got a bit of a tune, just give me half an hour’. In 10 minutes he came back and said, ‘Right I’ve got the lyrics and got the tune’. So he’d written Get It On in 10 minutes basically. He went out there, sang it and in four or five takes we’d got it. There it was. The guy was absolutely astonishing.""

"He chased us all round the studio and we had to lock ourselves into another studio to prevent him getting us. He was a big guy. He came in the following morning and he was alright. I think his management had had a word and said, ‘Look this album is going really well, it’s not a good idea to frighten the life out of people who are helping you make it’. He was quite pleasant, but he never apologised."

"It filled me with dread – she had a reputation for being difficult. She had been headlining on the Royal Command performance the night before we were due to start. She arrived and swept through reception looking like thunder and disappeared into the studio. I thought, ‘I’m the first here, I’d better go in and introduce myself’. I walked in and I said: ‘Morning Miss Bassey, my name is Martin Rushent and I’m going to be your new engineer and co-producer’. She threw a mic stand at me. She told me to get out. She apologised afterwards, I hasten to add."

"In [the early 1980s], making electronic music was a big job, particularly the way that I was doing it. To get the sounds I wanted, I might have 24 synthesizers playing one synth line, all programmed, all analogue and all drifting out of tune. It used to take hours and hours and hours. I don't know how we ever got through it."

"And grant that a man read all the books of music that ever were wrote, I shall not allow that music is or can be understood out of them, no more than the taste of meats out of cookish receipt books."

"My God! is any hour so sweet, From blush of morn to evening-star, As that which calls me to Thy feet,— The hour of prayer?"

"Lord! till I reach yon blissful shore, No privilege so dear shall be, As thus my inmost soul to pour In prayer to Thee."

"Renew my will from day to day! Blend it with Thine! and take away All that now makes it hard to say, "Thy will be done!""

"Blest is my lot, whate'er befall: What can disturb me, who appall, While, as my strength, my rock, my all, Saviour! I cling to Thee?"

"Just as I am — Thou wilt receive, Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve, Because Thy promise I believe— O Lamb of God, I come!"

"I saw the radiant Queen of Night Walking in brightness through the sky."

"Nay, all by Thee is ordered, chosen, planned, Each drop that fills my daily cup, Thy hand Prescribes for ills none else can understand, All, all is known to Thee."