Musicians From England

"As a musician you can cover everything. I'm not just a concert pianist."

"I think there is an incredible crisis now of how we train performers. Their training encourages them to behave as though they are back in the 19th century, and they are not allowed to get out of that box very much. 'If they play a tiny bit of contemporary music, it's looked on as a bit eccentric, and it's sort of tolerated instead of absolutely encouraged. And they certainly can't improvise, and they find it difficult to encounter jazz or jazz styles. 'I think they're all waking up to this, and it's very difficult for them, because the training and the value systems that get put on them go against what we all know to be the real world. Musicians do want to break out of these constraints. It's slightly boring to just play the same cycle of pieces over and over again."

"I've played Bach since I was a little girl. I can't let a day go by without playing him. He's so witty and secretive and funny and mathematical and brilliant."

"If you want a nine-to-five existence with weekends off then don't be a musician. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now if I had children. But it hasn't worked out like that."

"I got my apprenticeship, with the Young Concert Artists Trust, playing all these warhorses in Raymond Gubbay concerts. Some are not for me anymore, but I'd still play the Grieg at the drop of a hat; it's so fresh. I'm very careful to keep on playing a lot of mainstream repertoire. I'm not into being the court jester who just does the wacky stuff. Making the connections and taking people down new paths is what I enjoy."

"I wasn't part of that hothouse thing. I didn't go to the Yehudi Menuhin school. I grew up with the idea of trying to make music available to people of all abilities." The Guardian - 26/05/2000"

"I'm trained quite classically but quite freely by my mum, so even when I was little, I had this rather freewheeling approach. When I trained more seriously in my late teens at college, it was: here are the notes, here is what is expected of you. I didn't mind because you need technique, particularly on the piano, which requires a lot of stamina. And it was natural that once I had done that, I would want to go beyond classical music. How can you be yourself if all you do is reproduce someone else's notes?" The Guardian - 05/10/2001"

"School was strange, rather amusing - with a teacher standing at the front telling you what to write. The camaraderie was interesting. I tend to remember the things you can't recreate on your own - queuing up for your dinner, learning team games, which were a complete mystery to me. I remember having to pretend I knew how to play hockey, that kind of thing." The Mail on Sunday - 06/02/2000"

"I can see it must seem strange, but to me it was normality. Really, my memory of my childhood is that the sun always shone and I spent all my time playing in the park. Since then I've discovered that some of the great musicians I admire - Charles Ives, John Cage, even Bob Dylan - had quite unconventional childhoods." Evening Standard - 04/07/2002"

"I used to do Grade Exams, but my mum will tell you I didn't over-practise for them at all. I never practised, just played. I loved to play. I loved to play a lot* If one mistake is made with young children, it is trying to make them practise rather than just letting them play.' She played hymns at church ('My parents were very religious when we were young') and 'all the Top of the Pops number ones next morning at school. Things like David Bowie's "Life On Mars". That's got a very good piano part. And ever since I was six or seven years old, I always liked Bach - that's why I recorded the Anna Magdalene Notebook, little 16-bar preludes that Bach wrote for children.' I was amazed at how serious the other kids were about the whole thing, much more disciplined than I was, and with this attitude of "Ooh, I can't play sports because I might hurt my fingers" or "I can't listen to pop music because that's really terrible."

"Not only was I fiddling around at the keyboard but there were all these other children of all backgrounds wanting to play every sort of music bits of classical, jazz, pop, improvisation." The Guardian - 26/05/2000"

"You can give music variation without changing the notes. When you get close to a piece there will inevitable be tinkering. I sometimes wonder if concert pianists expend so much effort and energy finding new ways to interpret that what they really need is some more direct form of self-expression."

"I didn't go to school until I was 11. On your own you develop imagination."

"I was given so much advice. About how my hair should be, what I should wear, which competitions I should enter, what stuff I should play. None of that was relevant for me. I just had a kind of instinct."

"What was most odd was that teachers would tell you what to do and what to think and they would write everything on a blackboard and you would copy it all down." The Evening Standard - 04/07/2002"

"An interviewer had researched Lyttelton's other interests and asked him about "orthinology" (sic). Lyttelton said that he kept a straight face and answered the question but 24 hours later thought of what he should have replied: "Oh, you mean word-botching"."

"Now it's time to play a brand new game called Name That Barcode. Here's the first one: "Thick black, thin white, thick black, thick white, thick black, thin white." OK who's going to identify that?"

"Well as the vanquished charwoman of time begins to Shake-n-Vac the shagpile of eternity, I've noticed that we've just run out of time..."

"After tasting the meat pies, Samantha said she liked Mr Dewhurst’s beef in ale; although she preferred his tongue in cider."

"Coincidence is a wonderful thing."

"One musn't be misled by the amiable, bumbling persona. ... He is a toughly intelligent man moving confidently in any kind of surroundings from Windsor Castle to Birdland."

"Radio personality, humorist, writer, cartoonist, ex-Guards officer and aristocrat – Humphrey Lyttelton’s status as one of Britain’s favourite all-rounders sometimes overshadowed his true stature as a jazz musician. But jazz was always his first, abiding love. In 1936, as an Eton schoolboy, he fell under the spell of Louis Armstrong, taught himself trumpet and formed a band. After World War II, he spearheaded Britain’s trad-jazz revival, though he was always more in it than of it. Bored by the purists’ dogmatic style, he broke ranks in 1953 by adding a non-trad saxophone to his group. At the concert, outraged zealots responded with the banner: ‘Go home, dirty bopper!’ But as the title of one of Lyttelton’s books put it, I play as I please; what pleased him was imaginative, swinging jazz with plenty of emotional energy. This was evident from the washboard whimsy of his early recordings and his jovial forays into calypso, to the jump-band vigour of the mid-1950s that evolved into the smooth, hard-driving mainstream which he continued to the end of his life. In a career spanning over six decades, till his death in 2008, he encouraged and inspired many of the most prominent jazz musicians in Britain."

"From Bradford Yorkshire to Bristol Temple Meads you don't have to change your underwear but you have to change at Leeds"

"This winter I hope you get a splinter if you make a toboggan and it is a mahog'un"

"In the beginning was the dog the real name of Jehovah is Rover Adam's rib is buried in the garden"

"My grandmother used to say before you moan about the muck on someone else's glasses make sure you're not on about the muck on your own her glasses were filthy"

"I dont want to lose any of the emotion or energy. We are just testing how far we can bend pop in our direction."

"A common misperception of me is ... That I'm over-serious. I wish that people would take more notice of ... Carbon emissions. I am over-serious!"

"Sometimes."

"Our producer Nick thinks it's a dance record, and who are we to disagree? Don't be alarmed though, we won't be donning face masks and Gore-Tex like Altern 8, or dancing like electric monkeys. Apart from Lukas (Wooller, keyboards)."

"We all went to university here and spent the last 10 years living here, and we are among people who live here, who come to the show."

"In my heart a place, A most special place, And it's all for you, You're my girl, you're my, angel, The will's the same for us, Honey they can't be wrong, Cause everybody knows it was hard to break the sorrow, Then you came along"

"Today, I give it, all to you, On this day we recall the memories, Of what we're goin' through,"

"Crossing that bridge, With lessons I've learned. Playing with fire, And not getting burned. I may not know what you're going through. But time is the space, Between me and you. Life carries on... it goes on."

"Then the rainstorm came over me And I felt my spirit break I had lost all of my belief, you see And realized my mistake But time threw a prayer to me And all around me became still I need love, love's divine Please forgive me, now I see that I've been blind Give me love, love is what I need to help me know my name."

"Did you know, That when it snows, My eyes become large and The light that you shine can be seen."

"Ooh, the more I get of you, Stranger it feels, yeah. And now that your rose is in bloom, A light hits the gloom on the grave."

"There is so much a man can tell you, So much he can say. You remain, my power, my pleasure, my pain"

"Oh darlin... In a sky full of people, only some want to fly, Isn't that crazy? In a world full of people, only some want to fly, Isn't that crazy?"

"Family, my wife and children, that's my reason for being. Everything is done with them in mind, so perhaps that's the reason this new album is up-tempo. It does feel like a celebration of life. I am finally in a content and happy place to the point where I feel like I need to sing about it. It's made me want to address things that are close to home."

"Myself and the people close to me are all part of a social system, and we were being conditioned to accept the status quo. But on this album, I'm saying it's time for us to take charge. We can change it. We can take control of our emotional system and be happy. My point is don't just sit there and allow life to happen to you. Go out and take charge if you want change, but it begins closer to home."

"Now that your rose is in bloom, A light hits the gloom on the grave, I've been kissed by a rose on the grave."

"A man decides after seventy years, That what he goes there for, is to unlock the door. While those around him criticize and sleep... And through a fractal on a breaking wall, I see you my friend, and touch your face again. Miracles will happen as we trip.But we're never gonna survive, unless... We get a little crazy"

"There's nothing better than going out there and performing and making that connection with audiences. Even after all this time I get the biggest buzz from that."

"I've heard everything — that they were the result of ancient ritual induction into childhood that involved wrestling a wild boar, that I was viciously attacked by a gang. Someone even wrote that I was abducted by aliens who left me with a mark. You know, I really don't care. People can believe whatever they want to believe."

"Fearless people, Careless needle. Harsh words spoken, And lives are broken."

"There were signs in England that the only way for me was down. The media turned against me. I was given a hard time because my outlook wasn't one of pure debauchery. I was a sensitive male and I was singing about spirituality; I didn't choose the loutish Oasis approach to my profession. Britpop was just building up at the time and my attitude somehow counted against me."

"The enormity of the universe revealed by science cannot readily be grasped by the human brain, but the music of The Planets enables the mind to acquire some comprehension of the vastness of space where rational understanding fails."

"Music, being identical with heaven, isn't a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It's a condition of eternity."

"One of the advantages of being over forty is that one begins to learn the difference between knowing and realising."