Quotes About Music

OK, let's just get really, really mellow and peaceful. Let's make music that's just as intense as the electric stuff but which comes from a completely different, more loving place.

That's how these songs of his seem to come to him anyway. They start from simple everyday occurrences the composer finds himself running into on the tube, say, or maybe on his way down to the off licence. And then they blossom into raging chunks of perfectly matched melody and savage eloquence.

Each song highlights one feeling, and whatever that feeling, I think I've succeeded in showing the positive elements along with its gloomy side.

It's like there's a mighty reservoir of songs that no one's ever heard up there in heaven and there's a tap in Neil Young's brain that's somehow attached to it. All he has to do is ease his mind into the right gear and something will always come trickling down.

All this terrible self-destructive shit I supposedly did,' he claimed five years ago, 'I only did it because I believed I was in the right and that I was playing the music that real people with real lives wanted to hear. Frankly, throughout my life, I've always felt I was completely innocent. I see myself as a genuine innocent. Always have done.

The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn't cross the road to see them. It's people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.

Many fine keyboard players could and did emulate and recreate his parts, but nobody else other than Rick had the ability to create them in the first place.

At this time touring for most bands was still seen primarily as a way of promoting records to boost album sales, with the odd chance to get some income from the larger venues.

Listening back to 'Arnold Layne' now, and other songs from the same phase, I notice that I do not find myself cringing. I am definitely not embarrassed by our juvenilia. It all sounds pretty professional, even though it would have been recorded relatively quickly. With a limited number of tracks, you had to make decisions early on about which instrument would go on which track and then you mixed down. But the music genuinely doesn't seem to have suffered.

No more hired guns; just David, Rick and myself, with the engineer at the desk, a two-track left running – and as much time as we needed. Although bitter experience had taught us to be prepared for disappointment, and though there was no pressure to come up with anything concrete at these sessions, the very fact of booking the studio was an indication of our commitment.

I still find the most affecting moment on the whole record is where the last notes fade out and Rick introduces a wistful rubato line, on high notes, from 'See Emily Play'.

The album feels much more home-made, very much as a band playing together in one space. I think that Rick in particular felt significantly more integrated in the process this time, compared to Momentary Lapse. It was nice to have him back.

could not continue with Syd in this state, coupled to which it just was not fun any more – and doubtless no fun for Syd either. We did not want to lose Syd. He was our songwriter, singer, guitarist, and – although you might not have known from our less than sympathetic treatment of him – he was our friend.

My report card comments for the 'Atom Heart Mother' track would be: good idea, could try harder. 'Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast' on the second side is a similar example.

A far more taxing problem for David was establishing himself within the existing band. Officially he was the second guitarist and additional vocalist. But Syd saw David as an interloper, while the rest of the band saw him as a potential replacement for Syd.

Years before MTV, the system was for a band to appear on one of the celebrity shows then current. The presenter, usually a popular singer of a certain age anxious to extend his career, would sing a couple of numbers, and then bring guests on to chat, with musical interludes from the likes of us. With Syd approaching a catatonic state, you might think this was not a recipe for success, and you'd be right.

The R&B classics were mixed up with our longer workouts, so that 'Interstellar Overdrive', which we often used as an opener, might be followed immediately by a very straight cover of Bo Diddley's 'Can't Judge A Book' or Chuck Berry's 'Motivating', one of Syd's favourites.

We also gained an insight into how the rest of the music business viewed us when Alan Price raised a laugh at our expense by banging the reverb on his Hammond organ and announcing that this was psychedelic music. At the time we were mortified, probably because all our mums were in the audience; any sense of resentment has nearly worn off.

Meanwhile, Rick was supplying texture and melody, and Roger drive, discipline and musical forethought. As drummers are a law unto themselves, I fortunately have never had to justify my existence in quite the same way.

That complexity may only have been 'quiet, loud, quiet, loud again', but at a time when most rock bands only had two volume settings – painfully loud and really, really painfully loud – this was groundbreaking stuff.

We eventually ended up with enough left-over material that we considered releasing it as a second album, including a set we dubbed 'The Big Spliff', the kind of ambient mood music that we were bemused to find being adopted by bands like the Orb,

Both of these were played on the family's new state-of-the-art gramophone that was electric and connected to a device resembling a cross between the cabinets made in the days of Louis XIV and a Rolls-Royce dashboard.

We returned to the possibilities of musical instruments, and used a very soft beater on a padded bass drum, which strangely sounded far more lifelike, although the average heartbeat rate of 72 bpm was too fast and we slowed it down to a level that would have caused any cardiologist some concern.

Within a couple of years, I had gravitated towards a group of friends from the neighbourhood who had also discovered rock 'n' roll, and it seemed an excellent idea to put a band together. The fact that none of us knew how to play was only a minor setback, since we didn't have any instruments.