I can’t keep my fingers out of any pies.
My mother was a housewife. Both from – well, my father was from a farming family, agricultural family in the north of England. And my mother came from a very working class.
My father worked for a children’s home called Dr. Barnardo’s Homes. They’re a charity.
People got extremely comfortable with being able to turn on their television and see MTV say, “This guy’s hot you should buy this record.”
I guess Ziggy would have been the perfect vehicle to have done with.
I think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that’s happened in music in a long time.
I’m not actually a very keen performer. I like putting shows together. I like putting events together.
There’s something about the style of living in the country that they feel, “This is what represents me.” So style is about the philosophy of how we create our civilization.
I never heard so many kids talk about just doing anything to be famous. I mean, yeah, fame is part of the deal when you’re a kid and you think, I wanna go into music, but everybody that I knew was really doing it because of their love for it. I don’t see so much of that anymore.
And it’s always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn’t want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you’re dead as an artist.
Having not really written any generational songs – I think maybe two or three of the songs that I’ve ever written have any bearing on the age of the listener. My stuff tends to be far more concerned with the spiritual and with subjects like isolation and being miserable.
I think that my fascination with clothes generally was motivated by trying to create the characters for the stage.
I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.
Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.
I think that the history of rock could be recycled in a different way and brought back into focus without the luggage that comes along with it.
I guess a certain contingent of the musicians in London at the beginning of the ’70s were fed up with denim and the hippies. And I think we kind of wanted to go somewhere else.
I’m not a natural performer. I don’t like performing very much.
The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.
I don’t believe in proper cinema; it doesn’t have the strength of television. People having to go out to the cinema is really archaic. I’d much rather sit at home.
Since early middle ages when people generally taking away the barbarity of their like, were pretty content. Although it was all an illicit contentment, what with the slave systems all over the world, in England especially, the peasants and the master, etc. People were incredibly content.