What I like doing is writing and recording and much more on the, I guess, the – on that creative level. It’s fun interpreting songs and all that, but I wouldn’t like it as a living.
I really wanted to do, more than anything else, up until I was around 16, 17, was write musicals.
I never really had much of an interest in fashion.
I never really got the book together for the thing, so I had all the songs and the characters. But by the time we’d gotten it on the road and I’d been doing it for 18 months, oh God, I couldn’t wait to move on to something else.
Things have to hit for the moment. That’s one of the reasons I’m into video; the image has to hit immediately. I adore video and the whole cutting up of it.
I thought that I could do some kind of vehicle involving rock musicals and presenting rock and characters and storyline in a completely different fashion.
I would like to believe that people knew what they were fighting for and why they wanted a revolution, and exactly what it was within that they didn’t like.
There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t being used on MTV.
There’s a thing that just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated that you will never go below the dream stage. And I’ve used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed.
When I was 9 years old, I wanted to be the baritone sax player in the Little Richard band.
The character thing really is sort of, for me, personally, rather ancient history.
I wanted to rewrite how rock music was perceived.
Mine is really – Ziggy Stardust, characters, “Let’s Dance.” That’s me in the American.
In fact, in Europe, I’m more kind of this bloke what writes lots of stuff.
I guess, – a greater number of the 26 or so albums that I’ve made are known in Europe than they are in America.
A career of nearly 40 years, is not very long.
The world that I inhabit in reality is probably very different world than the one people expect that I would be in. It is quite sedate. It’s far removed from a lot of what they would feel to be the limousine traveling rock existence, or whatever.
In fact, everything I do is about the conceptualizing and realization of a piece of work, whether it’s the recording or the performance side.
I don’t live for the stage. I don’t live for an audience.
I think it’s rather a waste of time endlessly singing the same songs every night for a year, and it’s just not what I want to do.