I didn’t have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, “Well, I can do this.” And I liked doing it.
I don’t think people care about the mechanics of songwriting.
It’s nice to collect stamps, but if it becomes obsessive, and you start stealing for your stamps, it becomes too much.
I don’t really mind criticism in music or in shows and stuff like that at all. I mean, it doesn’t really worry me even if it’s like out of place. At least it’s relevant.
Starting off in music, the purpose of it was not to become like well known on the street and be famous. You know, I didn’t even think about that part of being famous. Famous for making records, yes, but famous face in a woman’s magazine, I never thought of that. I didn’t want that.
I don’t spend money on anything. I don’t collect anything. I don’t spend it on furniture.
Everyone in the movie industry wants to win an Oscar. I don’t think that’s why you make movies. But winning an Oscar is not just about making a great movie, unfortunately. It’s also having a good Oscar campaign.
I was never that interested in business, to be honest. I do the minimal amount of business as possible because I’m not actually interested in it as a thing. But some people are interested in it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The music’s rehearsed a lot. All people think about is, they think, in rock ‘n’ roll, they get the music off right and they think it’s okay standing, looking macho. Well, it’s not. That’s boring. If you want to be a performer you’ve got to do a lot more work than that.
I don’t hate journalists. You can’t hate a class of people. It’s wrong to say that. But I do think they’re a bit like poison. Never trust them. You can’t trust them as a class of people. It’s their job not to be trusted.
You have to realize that everyone in a band is all more or less together, and everyone has their own niche, and some people lead in some ways, and some people lead in others.
It’s a real buzz, even in front of 20 people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing tomatoes at me, I wouldn’t have gone on with it.
If you’re the singer in the band, you always get more attention than anyone else.
Most people in England don’t live in the North, and people are snobby in England, so they wanted a band from the South.
I didn’t really like being at college. It wasn’t like it was Oxford and had been the most wonderful time of my life. It was really a dull, boring course I was stuck on.
I don’t believe in astrology. It’s a lot of crap. I just think that’s another thing you should throw out the window. Mysticism. Cheap. It’s amazing that people still hang on to that after all these years.
That’s one of the good things about a lot of the young British bands, they are mixing all styles of music. I think that’s very good because that’s very modern.
Thousands of years people have taken drugs, whether it’s alcohol, which was invented about 5,000 years ago. People have been using that. And all kinds of marijuana and all these things, tobacco. So all these drugs have been – it seems to be the propensity of human beings to want to use them.
Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it’s also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive – because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.
I don’t find it easy dealing with people with drug problems. It helps if you’re all taking drugs, all the same drugs.
I took a certain pride in knowing I’d helped ruin his life enough to give him something substantial to write about.