The character thing really is sort of, for me, personally, rather ancient history.
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.
I don’t mind trying it out and making sure something seems to work well.
The people who don’t know so much about me regard me more sexually.
I’m regarded quite asexually by a lot of people. And the people that understand me the best are nearer to what I understand about me.
I’m quite certain that the audience that I’ve got for my stuff don’t listen to the lyrics.
I’m wary of the word glam because I think that became the all-inclusive term with for any bloke with lipstick on, which is fine, you know, and that’s what it is when it comes down to the public level.
Trying to tart the rock business up a bit is getting nearer to what the kids themselves are like, because what I find, if you want to talk in the terms of rock, a lot depends on sensationalism and the kids are a lot more sensational than the stars themselves.
I didn’t say that wearing a glamorization of the rock artist was any truer from the other thing.
Some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we’d better do something postmodernist – quickly, before somebody else did.
TV has eaten up everything else, and Warhol films are all that are left, which is fabulous. Pork could become the next I Love Lucy, the great American domestic comedy. It’s about how people really live, not like Lucy, who never touched dishwater. It’s about people living and hustling to survive.
Sexuality and where it is going is an extraordinary question, for I don’t see it going anywhere. It is with me, and that’s it.
The public, obviously, they takes things in a very simplest fashion and so they should. That’s why we have such wonderful television.
The media is either our salvation or our death.