Guitarists From England

"Soon it will be the phase of the moon When people tune in. Every girl knows about the punctual blues, But who's to know the power behind our moves?"

"You'll never know that you had all of me. You'll never know the poetry you've stirred in me. Of all the stars I've seen that shine so brightly, I've never known or felt in myself so rightly, It's in me..."

"There's something very special indeed, In all the places where I've seen you shine, boy. There's something very real in how I feel, honey. It's in me. It's in me, And you know it's for real. Tuning in on your saxophone..."

"How I'm moved. How you move me With your beauty's potency."

"Touch me, hold me. How my open arms ache! Try to fall for me."

"Moving stranger, Does it really matter, As long as you're not afraid to feel?"

"The great thing about art on any level is that it can speak to all people if it's achieved properly. When I've heard a piece of music or seen a painting that moves me, it gives me something. That's such an incredibly special experience. I have intentions as a writer, but people — when they're listening to a track — will take from it what they interpret. Sometimes people mishear my lyrics and think a song's about something it isn't. That doesn't matter. If it speaks to them and they get something positive from it, it's great."

"As an artist, you're never happy with anything you do. It's part of the process. You're never really happy. I'm certainly not. That's a good thing. It means you're always striving to do better. You hope the next piece will be better."

"I'm really very happy if people can connect at all to anything I do. I don't really mind if people mishear lyrics or misunderstand what the story is. I think that's what you have to let go of when you send it out in the world. I'm sure with a lot of paintings, people don't understand what the painter originally meant, and I don't really think that matters. I just think if you feel something, that's really the ideal goal. If that happens, then I'm really happy."

"I think musicians have a responsibility to try and do something that is good. It's so hard. It's very difficult to pull something out of the hat creatively. Although I say it's their responsibility, it's really just people trying to do the best that they can."

"David Bowie had everything. He was intelligent, imaginative, brave, charismatic, cool, sexy and truly inspirational both visually and musically. He created such staggeringly brilliant work, yes, but so much of it and it was so good. There are great people who make great work but who else has left a mark like his? No one like him."

"Now all the shows are over, it's pretty difficult to explain how I feel about it all. It was quite a surreal journey that kept its level of intensity right from the early stages to the end of the very last show. It was also such great fun. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I loved the whole process.... I was really delighted that the shows were received so positively and so warmly but the really unexpected part of it all was the audiences. Audiences that you could only ever dream of. One of the main reasons for wanting to perform live again was to have contact with that audience.They took my breath away. Every single night they were so behind us. You could feel their support from the minute we walked on stage. I just never imagined it would be possible to connect with an audience on such a powerful and intimate level; to feel such, well quite frankly, love. It was like this at every single show. Thank you so very much to everyone who came to the shows and became part of that shared experience. It was a truly special and wonderful feeling for all of us."

"For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living such a normal life. It's so a part of who I am. It's so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. Friends of mine in the business don't know how dishwashers work. For me, that's frightening. I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being. Even more so now where you've got this sort of truly silly preoccupation with celebrities. Just because somebody's been in an ad on TV, so what? Who gives a toss?"

"There was a story that some EMI execs had come down to see you and you'd said something like: "Here's what I've been working on," and then produced some cakes from your oven. True? "No! I don't know where that came from. I thought that was quite funny actually. It presents me as this homely creature, which is all right, isn't it?""

"There were so many times I thought, "I'll have the album finished this year, definitely, we'll get it out this year." Then there were a couple of years where I thought, "I'm never gonna do this." If I could make albums quicker, I'd be on a roll wouldn't I? Everything just seems to take so much time. I don't know why. Time... evaporates."

"I do think I go out of my way to be a very normal person and I just find it frustrating that people think that I'm some kind of weirdo reclusive that never comes out into the world. Y'know, I'm a very strong person and I think that's why actually I find it really infuriating when I read, 'She had a nervous breakdown' or 'She's not very mentally stable, just a weak, frail little creature'."

"For me to get into that creative process I have to have a sort of quiet place that I work from. And if I was living the life of ... somebody in the industry, as a pop star or whatever, it's too distracting. It's too to do with other people's perceptions of who you are, and what's important to me is to be a human being who has a soul, and who hopefully has a sense of who they are, not who everybody else thinks you are. And I think, you know, that's something that's very difficult for people who become extremely famous. I mean, I find it completely ridiculous this obsession with celebrities. ... Why are celebrities so important to people? It's absolute crap. I mean, the important people are surgeons and doctors and people actually put people back together and make a difference to people's lives. Not somebody who's in an ad on telly. I mean, okay, so that's valid for what it is, too. But why so much attention on something that's so shallow?"

"It's about a relationship between a man and a woman. They love each other very much, and the power of the relationship is something that gets in the way. It creates insecurities. It's saying if the man could be the woman and the woman the man, if they could make a deal with God, to change places, that they'd understand what it's like to be the other person and perhaps it would clear up misunderstandings. You know, all the little problems; there would be no problem."

"I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman, can't understand each other because we are a man and a woman. And if we could actually swap each other's roles, if we could actually be in each other's place for a while, I think we'd both be very surprised! ...And I think it would lead to a greater understanding. And really the only way I could think it could be done was either... you know, I thought a deal with the devil, you know. And I thought, "well, no, why not a deal with God!" You know, because in a way it's so much more powerful the whole idea of asking God to make a deal with you. You see, for me it is still called "Deal With God", that was its title. But we were told that if we kept this title that it would not be played in any of the religious countries, Italy wouldn't play it, France wouldn't play it, and Australia wouldn't play it! Ireland wouldn't play it, and that generally we might get it blacked purely because it had God in the title."

"I only like extreme talent. It's the only thing I can listen to. Where does Kate Bush come from? You can't hear her influences. It's like Billie Holiday, when I first heard Billie Holiday, I'd never heard anything like that in my life — the same with Kate Bush. I can't figure out musically, artistically, who her mother and father is."

"The working relationship was never a problem, you know. We always worked together reasonably well, you know, we always argue, and we always have and always will. I've always argued with Kate, and she's always argued with me, but I guess that's just the way it is, you know, so I feel I'm emotionally involved with it all, to a great extent, you know, much more so than most people would imagine. Not only did we have a personal relationship, and I work with her — I really love her music, I really do... to the point, where I virtually work with nobody else — because nobody else comes close."

"I knew from day one, I knew ... there was no way this girl was not going to make it. She was going to be a huge success. There was no way, because she was so driven for it. And her enthusiasm for it all was infectious."

"I was teaching at the Dance Centre in Covent Garden. Kate turned up, dressed very properly in her ballet tights and things, and her hair straight back, looking very, very professional indeed, a very, very serious student. But as timid as hell, and of course she took a place at the back of the class, you know, I had to coax her forward. I mean she was extremely shy, extremely timid, and of course the first thing I had to do was, you know, bring her out of herself, give her courage. I have to say that once Kate actually started dancing, she was a wild thing, she was wild. … One day, some months after knowing her, I got back to my home … and there was this LP pushed under the door, The Kick Inside — and there, dedicated to me was this beautiful song "Moving" — I didn't know she had any aspirations of being a singer. She never talked about herself."

"My favorite album by her is The Dreaming, and I think she produced that one herself. That got a lot of criticism — but I loved it. It was overloaded with textures, and tones and all manner of things. It's a record that I still can play to this day, and still hear new things."

"When I first heard it, I thought that's extremely challenging, the vocal — it was almost hysterical, and it was so up there, the register, but it was absolutely fascinating. And I know at the time a lot of my friends couldn't bear it, they thought it was just "too much" — but that's exactly what drew me in."

"That record she did with Peter Gabriel saved my life. That record helped me get sober. So she played a big part in my actual downfall and kind of "rebirth'" as it were. That record helped me so much. I never told her that, but it did."

""Wuthering Heights" was not your normal type song — but that's why it was so brilliant. It was something out the norm. When something like that comes along, they don't come along that often. When does the next Kate Bush come along, after Kate Bush? There hasn't been one."

"They're not "normal" songs. None of her songs have been "normal." She's just who she is, she's unique. She's — a mystery. She's the most beautiful mystery. ... Let me tell you a story: when I had my civil partnership, nine years ago, in 2005, and Kate — we invited Kate, we didn't think she'd come but she came, she came with her husband Danny, and there were a lot of very famous people in that room, there were like 600 people — and all anybody wanted to meet was Kate Bush. I mean, musician, anybody, they couldn't believe Kate Bush was there. She's kind of an enigma."

"I really thank Kate, because these touchstones like "This Woman's Work", that kind of song, it's celebrating everything that's so wonderful about being a woman, and being nurturing, and intuitive and emotional, and gentle and sensual, and just like really intimate. People don't put their hearts on the line in that vulnerable way very much, and me, as an artist myself, it's helped me to not be frightened, to show all, as much of my vulnerability as a woman as possible, and in that be powerful."

"This is a whole universe I can dive into — and for me, it was very avant-garde, and expressive and kind of from a complete different planet to everything else that you see from the eighties ... it's like she was definitely out their on her own. ... She seems to have an endless kind of ability to put herself in and with empathize with different characters and viewpoints."

"It is absolutely beautiful, isn't it? And its a sort of over two years before any of the other recordings she did. That is her singing at the age of 16, and having written those extraordinary lyrics — about whatever they're about."

"I had a listen, I was intrigued ... by this strange voice, and I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent, and she played me, it must have been forty or fifty songs, on tape, and I thought, I should try to do something. ... We were making — Pink Floyd was making the Wish You Were Here album, and I think we had the record company people down at Abbey Road, in number 3, and I said to them "Do you want to hear something I've got? And they said "sure", so we found another room, and I played it to them, "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", and they said "Yep, thank you – we'll have it.""

"Its funny no one ever applies the term "progressive rock" to Kate Bush, but to me its prog. It's the same think I love about the best prog, it's like, the really sort of brash stuff, people showing technical ability, I have no interest in, but the experimental dreamy stuff, that sort of came from many places at once, I set her stuff next to, well next to Janis, is the obvious comparison..."

"Kate Bush makes a record, and you don't hear from her. And you play the stuff she has made, and one day you are surprised, and she brings out something else, and she's been quietly working away on it, for however long she wanted to work on it, and I love that. I love the willingness to be quiet, until its time to speak — which is something that she does over and over."

"One of the things I love about Kate Bush is her absolute ability to take things, to pluck things that you would never expect to see on a rock album, and put them there and make them work. James Joyce's Ulysses — one of the greatest passages in all of English or Anglo-Irish literature, is Molly Bloom's glorious soliloquy ending in a sequence of Yeses. It's about embracing the world of the senses, embracing yourself, embracing sex, embracing love, embracing the future, embracing all possibility, and it goes all the way back to me, to "Wuthering Heights" — this is somebody who is not afraid of books. This is somebody who is not afraid of reading, somebody who's not afraid of writers, and who's not afraid of translating, being an intermediary, being a door, between the world of books and the world of rock."