Robert Wyatt Quotes

Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.

I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.

I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.

When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.

I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away.

I don't know how many thoughts we have a second, but it's quite an amazing number, and just to pin down the appropriate sequence of those, all you really need is a pencil and a piece of paper.

I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.

I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar

I only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question.

I know people who grow old and bitter. I want to keep making a fresh start. I don't want them to defeat me. That would be suicidal.

When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice.

I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.

It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.

We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.

I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.

This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.

Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.

I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I'm just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left.

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.

The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.

Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience.

It just doesnt mean anything to me, the high-profile, big money side of things. I just want enough to live on, and to be able to get on with what I do, and hang around my friends.

I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.

Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.

I don't want to be a professional cripple. And I don't see the suicide stuff as tragic.

People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?

On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers.

I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.

When I'm singing I try not be a singer with a capital S. I just try to get it out so I feel comfortable with it.

My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth.

I play music a lot but on my own mostly, so it was nice to be around other people. There was a certain sense a relief in the physical act of just playing and being with other musicians.

I don't do live things.

In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.

Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.

The missing links in my life's work, no less!

I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.

The cultural mix that's happened in the United States is wonderful! Funny enough, one of the most wonderful things about it is that there is no American race.

Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.

The United States is a country where everybody can start again.

What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation.

What I like about popular culture is its accessibility, and I've covered popular songs because they are amazing things.

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.

I do think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world.

I think the people who did well, or are happy, in a youth industry, they define themselves out of the business after a decade or so.