All Quotes

"David Gilmour’s titanic playing on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" has some of the most imitated feel and tone in history. Gilmour pays tribute to blues pioneers, particularly BB King, with his controlled feel and sublime behind-the-beat timing."

"David Gilmour laid down some of the tastiest solos of the decade. While Ritchie Blackmore set new standards for flash, Gilmour’s tasteful phrasing and sublime behind-the-beat feel showed the power of a few well-placed notes."

"His glorious fuzz tone, a silicon Fuzz Face boosted by a Colorsound Powerboost overdrive, is one of the most sought-after sounds in rock."

"I'm full of dust and guitars…"

"All middle men are bad."

"I don't think I'm easy to talk about. I've got a very irregular head. And I'm not anything that you think I am anyway."

"And what exactly is a dream, and what exactly is a joke?"

"It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here, and I'm most obliged to you for making it clear that I'm not here."

"Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter…I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done…But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger."

"That's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way."

"Well, I've got a colour telly, and a fridge. I've got some pork chops in the fridge, but the chops keep going off, so I have to keep buying more."

"We feel that in the future, groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show. They'll have to offer a well-presented theatre show."

"Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people, I would've thought, primarily. I mean, anybody walking into an art school like that would've been tricked--maybe they were working their entry into an art school."

"Syd was so beautiful with his violet eyes. I only sort of lay beside him, nothing more could be accomplished. Then he had a breakdown and was gone. He hardly spoke. He would just tolerate me because I was so overpowered, so in awe that I didn't really speak either. I only hung around him for two or three weeks just before he flipped and was virtually removed from the group. I knew Syd was wonderful because he wrote such wonderful songs. He didn't have to speak because the fact that he couldn't speak made him who he was: this person who wrote these mysterious songs. I just liked looking at him: he was very pretty. A lot of the time with pop stars, when they open their mouths, it was all completely ruined anyway. So it was perfect that he was like that. My first pop star and it was just wonderful that he didn't speak."

"It's sad that these people think he's such a wonderful subject, that he's a living legend when, in fact, there is this poor sad man who can't deal with life or himself. He's got uncontrollable things in him that he can't deal with and people think it's a marvellous, wonderful, romantic thing. It's just a sad, sad thing, a very nice and talented person who's just disintegrated."

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

"If you had said to a young Syd, ‘Look, this is your bargain in life, you know, you’re going to do this fantastic stuff, but it won’t be forever, it’ll be this short period. There’s the dotted line, are you going to sign for this?’ I suspect, maybe, a lot of people would sign for that, for making their mark."

""He was firstly an artist and secondly a musician. If ever he was asked what he did, the reaction would always be 'I'm an artist', never 'I'm a musician.' *"

"'... I remember seeing an early R.E.M. gig at the Hammersmith Odeon. I went backstage and they were all very warm and welcoming, apart from Michael Stipe who just sat in the corner with his back to me. Then he went on for the encore and did an a cappella version of [Syd's] 'Black Globe', which might have been his way of saying, "Syd was all right but you're an arsehole."'*"

"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.""

"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.""

"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?"

"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."

"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.""

"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."

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

"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."

"It had to be something real bad. I think he stole music online."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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 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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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 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!"

"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."

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

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

"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."

"I'm not saying the battle is won But on Saturday night all those kids in the sun Wrested technology's sword from the hands of the warlords Ooh, the tide is turning Ooh, the tide is turning."

"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.""

"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"

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

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