Guitarists From England

"You know the one that takes you to the places where all the veins meet, yeah."

"Cause it's a bitter sweet symphony, that's life Try to make ends meet you're a slave to money then you die.No change, I can change I can change, I can change But I'm here in my mold I am here in my mold and I'm a million different people from one day to the next I can't change my mould, no, no, no, no, no..."

"It’s just sex and violence, melody and silence."

"Sinking faster than a boat without a hull."

"Eyes open wide, looking at the heavens with a tear in my eye."

"If trees cut stars and eyes to heaven I'll bend them back, I'll bend them again If my skin looks tired and old from living I'll turn right back and live it again"

"I wander lonely streets behind where the old Thames does flow And in every face I meet reminds me of what I have run for"

"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?"

"I woke at 9:57 having got to bed at 6:30 subsequent to spraying burning guitar over David Bowie's new album and not leaving the studio until 5:00."

"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..."

"A principle is universal, a rule is inflexible, a law is invariable."

"We are able to be with others only to the degree that we are able to be ourselves. This being so, we can only be in the performance to the degree that we can be ourselves: to be who we are."

"We begin with the possible, and move gradually towards the impossible."

"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."

"If we don’t know where we’re going, we’ll probably get there; if where we are going is how we get there, we are already where we are going."

"It is difficult to exaggerate the power of habit."

"Creative work is serious play."

"A mistake is always forgivable, rarely excusable, and never acceptable."

"...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..."

"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."

"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."

"Guitarists who play fast are insecure. I can’t really stomach too many guitar players who just play these non-stop, incessant runs. It gets crazy; it’s just exercises. There has to be a reason for soloing. Usually, guitar players who play that fast and put everything they can into solos are insecure. The more sophisticated and mature guitarists become, the more they go with the feel. If you try to play too technically, you lose something in the music—like you’re playing for another guitarist. I like to play for people. The most important thing to me are the vocals, then the arrangement, and then the song. And way down, ‘Oh yes, there has to be a guitar solo.’ Whereas for a lot of players, everything revolves around the solo."

"Jeff can play damn fast, but he chooses not to most of the time, and that’s what impresses me. It’s what he chooses to leave out rather than what he chooses to stick in."

"Listening to as many guitar solos as possible is the best method for someone in the early stages. But saxophone solos can be helpful. They're interesting because they're all single notes, and therefore can be repeated on the guitar. If you can copy a sax solo you're playing very well, because the average saxophonist can play much better than the average guitarist."

"Well, I play purely from the heart, y'know, and so if it doesn't work the first couple of hours, forget it. Unless we feel like we're somehow on the right track then I'll keep on going. That's it, really; I don't have any magic where I just press a button and it happens. It'll either happen or it won't."

"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've got no particular desire to play ten minute solos. Those were never valid anyway in my book -- never. It was just a cheap way of building up a tension in the audience...A solo should do something; it shouldn't just be there as a cosmetic. It should have some aim, take the tune somewhere. I'm not saying I can do it, but I try and take the tune somewhere."

"I used to practice scales, but I think mainly in positions. I do runs that go from position to position, basically around chord shapes. I can get around pretty easily from one position to another, and on a good night it sound pretty hot. I'll take chances. Sometimes I'll trip over myself, but most times I'm lucky."

"The musician is as rich as the music they give away."

"Act with courtesy - Otherwise, be polite, but always be kind."

"Me and a book is a party. Me and a book and a cup of coffee is an orgy."

"Music so wishes to be heard that sometimes it calls on unlikely characters to give it voice, and ears. This wishing-to-be heard calls into existence the Performance Event; where music, musician and audience may come together as one, in communion. This communion has six different forms of being and experiencing itself (plus an invisible seventh); and these forms, or principles, are simultaneously present within the Performance."

"You see, the thing is, I’ve been in jams like this. The feeling is totally there among the musicians (and whoever else happens to be sitting around, whether they’ve paid for it or not, probably, and preferably, not). You are close to silence, Silence with a capital S. You are in tune with silence, the deepest sound of them all. Every sound, therefore, that you make, make with intention, sensitivity, and awareness, has a meaning, an ineffability, a significance. You are listening, Listening with a capital L. You hear what everyone else is doing; you do whatever is necessary, which is usually as little as possible. It has nothing to do with self-expression: it has to do with a group mind."

"There is no such thing as making a mistake. Only one thing is compulsory, only one mistake: and that is not realizing your mistakes."

"Normality is what we might achieve, given who we are, what we are, the conditions and limitations of the world we work within."

"Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence. Sound is that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken."

"With a note of music, one strikes the fundamental, and, in addition to the root note, other notes are generated: these are called the harmonic series...As one fundamental note contains within it other notes in the octave, two fundamentals produce a remarkable array of harmonics, and the number of possible combinations between all the notes increases phenomenally. With a triad, affairs stand a good chance of getting severely out of hand..."

"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.""

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

"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."

"[In 1982] Joe and Gaby were still living in their rented flat above an antique shop in Portland Road in Holland Park. [...]During March 1983, Joe and Gaby finally bought somewhere to live. The blue terraced building of 37, Lancaster Road in Notting Hill was situated a matter of yards away from Ladbroke Grove and the Westway, and was exactly the type of house Joe used to squat in his 101'ers days."

"Joe would go into everything at a million miles an hour and then change his mind."

"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."

"It's taken Joe's death to make me realise just how big The Clash were. We were a political band and Joe was the one who wrote the lyrics. Joe was one of the truest guys you could ever meet. If he said 'I am behind you', then you knew he meant it 100 per cent."

"Like thousands of teenagers growing up in the '70s, punk and The Clash changed my life in a fundamental way. Their mixture of politics and music shaped my beliefs and tastes and made me the person I am today. Christmas is ruined."

"The Clash are the kind of garage band who should be returned to the garage immediately, preferably with the engine running, which would undoubtedly be more of a loss to their friends and families than to either rock or roll. Their guitarist on the extreme left, allegedly known as Joe Strummer, has good moves but he and the band are a little shaky on ground that involves starting, stopping and changing chords at approximately the same time.""

"London Calling - Yes, I was there, too, And you know what they said? Well some of it was true. London Calling at the top of the dial… And after all this, won't you give me a smile?"

"All the power's in the hands of people rich enough to buy it."

"You have the right not to be killed, unless it was done by a policeman or an aristocrat."