Alternative Rock Singers

"The Power. If anyone deserves to battle Animal from The Muppets on the drums, it’s Dave Grohl. In my younger years, it was the coolest thing in the world to be a hard hitter and I drew constant inspiration from not only Dave’s aggressive hitting, but his choice of unique grooves and fills, which twist your mind yet remain spacious and serve the song. There’s no doubt he approaches his drum parts as a songwriter, and that may be the biggest thing I was able to take away from him."

"David Grohl is such a nice guy."

"Would the king of punks be a cliché? Oh, no, vicar."

"Almost killed me, nothing to be laughed at. But oddly enough it’s something that made me. Without that, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today, so thank God I almost died. The pain I had to endure of losing my memory and forgetting who I was — that’s always still in me. I never explained it until the book, and the songs — what agony that was for me. My greatest sense of achievement was conquering that."

"The class system is there to remind you that you’re just a dirty oik because you came from that side of the tracks."

"Are you really going to hand over the White House to a real estate agent? [...] I want a wig just like that one."

"It’s a family house."

"The only things I’ve ever confronted are institutions, religion, politics, but never my fellow human beings, and yet my fellow human beings find the need to defend those very things that are restricting their freedoms. God, that sounds like a speech. Should I run for president?"

"My favourite 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."

"You don't write "God Save The Queen" because you hate the English race, you write a song like that because you love them; and you're fed up with them being mistreated."

"[On Sid Vicious] Yes I can take on England, but I couldn't take on one heroin addict."

"I’ve not done any of this for superstardom, quite the opposite. I threw away the rock star mantle. And for that, there’s resentment too: ‘How dare he, how dare he.’"

"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."

"[Replying to the question of the presenter: "where did the name "Sex Pistols" come from, who thought this name up?"] Some animal. I can't remember. It doesn't matter. It's history."

"It's no more of that 12 bar ditty wavy hair in the breeze platform boots flap your flare nonsense. It's not a packaged image of third-rate idiots. It's not a pose. We just do our stuff. Hate it as it usually is, you know I was very shocked by the reviews of the last album. I believe none of them. They liked us for the wrong reasons, trendy reasons."

"How can you ban language, words? How're words offensive? And why should I have to tolerate YOUR interpretation? I'm the one using the word. ASK me how I'm using it, don't TELL me. And if you don't like the way I'm using it, so what? It's my right. It's my freedom of expression. Without that, we're nothing but slaves. My language, now fuck off!!!"

"I wanted them to see the gloriousness of the California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah desert. So every chance we got, we stopped the bus and just absorbed that dead heat beauty and that terrain."

"Turn the other cheek too often and you get a razor through it."

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Good night!"

"If the Royal Family was going to assassinate someone, they would have gotten rid of me a long time ago."

"Punk is like looking at a mirror. I already have a mirror so I don't need the Offspring to remind me how gorgeous I am."

"Joe Strummer, God bless him, he's gone and he shall be missed. But how dare he preach class war with an organisation like that [the late '80s Rock Against The Rich movement]. Living in a huge house in Holland Park. Every photo opportunity to be seen on a bus in his leather jacket, and then he went back to a palace. You're not getting it quite right there! That's where his image mattered more to him than the reality. He was trying to con us. In a nice way and for the right reasons but once you start lying it carries on and on and on."

"England's a violent place. Too violent for me. That's why I prefer it here (the USA). For a gun-toting nation, Americans are surprisingly passive. This place suits me and the wife."

"[On the lyrics of his songs] They meant a lot to my generation. And it's nice to know you've written songs that mean something to someone rather than some trivial pop dirge. I'm not thriving off a career slagging off the Queen. I think I have something valid to say. My words are my bullets. I like to brag that somehow I got it right."

"I've never told anyone this, but I suffer from terrible stage fright. True. You can't tell though, can you? Unbelievable, the panic. I nearly die of fear before I go on stage. Something wicked. I can't eat a thing the day before a gig. It'd make me vomit. Once I come off? I could eat a scampied elephant between two buttered mattresses. But I'm kinda glad about the stage fright. I've read Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud about their terror. And I reckon it's what gets the adrenalin going."

"There were definitely lyrics and they were very meaningful. I think."

"But people like to say, Oh, it's in the blood. But art comes from nowhere. It comes from a vague, scary place. It's scary because you don't know when it's coming or if it will ever come again. It's this Other."

"About a year ago, I started seeing these ads in the paper for 'Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation'. First it was a little ad. The next week, it was twice as big. And after a month, it was a full page-it just took over. Something in that triggered a bunch of associations and projections. Like, what kind of activities do you have to engage in to get to the point where you need to bring a laser into the equation?"

"There are so many elements flying in so many different directions that you really have to go with what feels like instinctively. The nature of the universe is fairly whimsical and nonsensical. In the most somber, beatific peacefulness there's complete chaos and maniacal laughter. I think music that doesn't reflect that is boring."

"You'd have to be a total idiot to say, 'I'm the slacker-generation guy. This is my generation.' I'd be laughed out of the room in an instant. I didn't even connect ['Loser'] at all to that kind of message until they were playing it on the radio and I heard it, and they said "This is the slacker anthem," and I thought, 'Oh shit, that sucks.' It's not some anguished transcendental 'cry of a generation.' It's just sitting in someone's living room eating pizza and Doritos."

"I think it would be great to have a mall that looked like stores but you weren't selling things. You were just going to hang out or do things. Or if somebody bought a mall and turned it into a house that people could kind of come to and you could build rooms, and it's all orange furniture. Or you could just build environments. Reclaim a mall just in the name of aesthetics or to make something beautiful or something that has no real purpose. Wouldn't that be amazing?"

"My mother was mistrustful of the education system, so it was all right with her if we didn't go to school. She was taking us to Truffaut films, and I was busy getting through a Knut Hamsun book or something, so she felt satisfied we weren't wasting our lives watching The Brady Bunch. Because of where we lived, I would've had to go to Belmont High, so the year I was supposed to start high school I tried to get into the High School for the Performing Arts, which had just opened. I sent them a tape of me playing blues guitar and some short stories I'd written, but they didn't want me."

"I never really had them. I always get the eccentric kids who dress funny and sit and write poetry for three months in their bedrooms... ...I was going to see tons of shows when I was a teenager, so if I was a girl, would that have made me a groupie? If I wanted to shake Thurston Moore's hand or something?"

"I try not to obsess about recording. I'm definitely the one who will leave all the mistakes-to have that balance between what's undone and done. I try to move on to the next thing. I have friends who have been working on the same song for five, six years. They just won't let the songs go."

"I have a fear of heights, so falling off something very tall. But I've conquered a good amount of my fears. I guess most people would have the fear of getting up in front of a large audience of people and making a fool of themselves. I've gotten over that."

"Oh, the tragedy and the anguish. You just gotta Rage Against the Appliance, man. The toast is burning and you just gotta rip it out and free it before it fills the house with smoke. Rage Against the Toaster."

"I think it's interesting being American, the expectations for an American guy, and the image that has to be projected. 'Oh, I can't wear pink,' that kind of stuff. There's none of that in Europe."

"We had one night where I wanted a bunch of percussion noises at the end of song. We went into this room with three cases of percussion. Everybody just grabbed different shakers and things and was just throwing them around. A few of the guys in the band got a little carried away and I just remember looking up and somebody was running into a wall. Another guy was leaping head first about three of four feet in the air. But other than that it was pretty sedated."

"I think I gave indications early on that mine wasn't just going to be a commercial, er, career. If that were the case, then the first record would have been 10 versions of 'Loser.' I always thought it would be interesting if there was no such thing as gold and platinum records, or record deals, and people were just making music. What would the music sound like?"

"Our whole culture in this country now is so conformist. I don't even meet that many freaks any more."

"I don't need to cry so much. I think whatever you let loose with crying, I let loose with singing. I tend to be the one who wants... I'm trying to say this without sounding too touchy-feely. I'm usually the one who's better at comforting the person who's crying, you know?"

"I remember being really shocked after Mellow Gold came out and going on tour, and all these kids were there. It totally disturbed me. Who are all these young people? I'd been playing Mississippi John Hurt covers in coffee shops to a bunch of thirty-, forty-, fifty-year olds. Then all of a sudden there were these teenagers."

"We played a gig in the Swiss Alps at a snowboarding convention. Red Bull-this energy sports-fuel drink-sponsored the whole thing. It has some ingredient believed to be bull-testicle extract. We went way off our tour route, had to take two planes and missed a night's sleep. We got up there and there's no snow-it's all mud. You couldn't walk. You'd step and then be up to your knee in mud. So you had several thousand disgruntled snowboarders tanked up to the max on bull-testicle extract. Of course, for some reason, these strapping brutes were made to wait out in the mid and the rain before coming into the tent for the show. When we get up to play, I see this forty-foot gap between us and the audience-they still managed to nail us with empty cans of Red Bull. After a few songs, I wasn't really playing my guitar, I was using it to bay cans back into the crowd of disgruntled sports enthusiasts. It felt like we were A Flock of Seagulls opening for Napalm Death."

"I'm not good at the protocols of dating. [laughs] I'm not really experienced in that. My girlfriend is my second or third girlfriend. I think in the past none of us really knew when we were "dating"-we were just hanging out and doing things. I didn't go to high school so I missed the prom."

"One of the reasons I'm a musician is because music isn't divisive. It's a medium where you don't have to abide by divisions. The whole idea is anarchy and the best music just doesn't give a fuck. And too much music is just so conservative these days. So I really don't want to be careful about anything. And there's so much music that's trying to be offensive these days, trying to be aggressive and abrasive. But it's just cheap and manipulative. So if I can offend someone in a good way and challenge their belief system, then I think that's positive. I mean, I wonder what their problem with it is? I don't have a problem. Wanda Coleman doesn't have a problem with me singing like that."

"I recently saw The Last American Virgin, one of those early-'80s coming-of-age movies. And the actors, they look like kids you grew up with! Today's teen movies, I didn't know anybody who looked like that. The standards now are so unbelievably high."

"So she won’t sleep better alone, And he won’t sleep better alone, No they won’t feel better alone. ~ "Sleep Better""

"Hey don't lock and turn away, lose your life today and follow me into the alleyway."

"Saw my reflection, covered in glass. How It reminds me of you."

"Don't say nothing bout the old house. Cos I burned it to the ground. And when the darkness comes, I lie awake. Playing lost and found"