It’s easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.
I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I’ve never been interested in that.
The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.
We’re going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It’s the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.
I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‘Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!’
I remember when in the early days of rock’n’roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I’ll say “1959” or “1961.” I can hear precisely. It’s like it has a huge date stamp on it.
I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.
Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, “Well, if everyone likes it it can’t be that good.” Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.
I’m very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.
For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.
For me it’s always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it’s always sound first and then the line afterwards.
I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, ‘I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!’ is so sociologically fascinating that I think I’d better watch.
I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It’s by the sea, there’s a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.
I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‘What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?’
I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they’re inclined to encourage that.