Quotes About Music

Rick played trumpet as a schoolboy, and always maintained that he played the piano before he could walk… but would then add that he didn't walk until he was ten.

Storm also recalls that Syd adored the Beatles, at a time when most of his friends preferred the Stones.

It was still rare for musicians to be allowed anywhere near the mixing desk, and not unknown for session players to be brought in to save on studio time: the Beatles had begun changing this, as their success convinced record companies to interfere less and less. Virtually every subsequent band owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Beatles for creating an attitude where popular music was made by the artists, and not constructed for them.

These were the early warning signals of fundamental disagreements within the band. Lines were being drawn in the sand, indistinctly and involuntarily, but being drawn nonetheless. At the risk of simplifying things too far, David and Rick felt more comfortable with a purer musical solution. Roger and I were drawn towards experimenting with the balances, and making more of the non-musical elements. David always preferred a certain amount of echo, Roger preferred the sound to be much drier.

Everyone remembers Syd for his songwriting, but he probably deserves equal credit for his radical concept of improvised rock music.

Curiously we did it all over again when we made the Live At Pompeii film, this time using another dog, called Mademoiselle Nobs. On the positive side, even when hard pressed, at least we resisted the temptation to construct an entire album of barking dogs, and to audition a clutch of session dogs desperate to make it in the music business.

I headed out front to watch Paul McCartney and U2 perform 'Sgt Pepper' and even as a fully paid-up, jaded and jaundiced veteran of the music business, was moved by the power and strength of what was happening both on stage and in the audience.

Preliminary discussions threw up the idea of a record created entirely out of sounds that had not been produced by musical instruments. This seemed suitably radical, and so we started out on a project we called 'Household Objects'. The whole notion seems absurdly laboured now, when any sound can be sampled and then laid out across a keyboard, enabling a musician to play anything from barking dogs to nuclear explosions.

You listen to a piece of music and it will remind you of something - it might make you happy, it might make you sad, but it is very emotive. And I think that Duran Duran have always understood that.

On February 3, 1959, near Fargo, North Dakota, an airplane carrying Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson) crashed, killing all aboard. Waylon Jennings, who was in Holly's band at the time, gave his seat to the Big Bopper at the last minute.

You can forget Proust and those stupid cakes. Beatles' songs are more potent.

Female rappers get it the hardest. You have to be a girl, yet you have to be just as hard as the guys. I think some female rappers get scared out of the business before they can make it.

I was not jealous of his intelligence — he is entirely superficial, which is why he never knows what to look like. Or what music to make. Or whether to be a boy or a girl.

His voice was like the cowbells, soft-metalled and dull, but with music buried in it somewhere.

The musicians were hidden at the heart of the enclosure; the music seemed to come from the sky. God music.

Albinoni streamed as clear as the sun into the dining room. The old mahogany glowed like bronze. The flatware winked.

The king and Osric had vanished, gone ahead around the curve, and Hild walked alone-they all walked alone-along the inwardly spiralling path painted with tales, the characters from songs she had heard in hall all her life, songs of music and magic, of heroes and beginnings.

Hild, always visible, always watched, settled an attentive look on her face and drifted away into the music still cycling through her head. Cool, clear, endless as the sky. Perhaps it would help with any cleansing to come.

The women's hall, if anything, was even bawdier than the men's. Veils were askew and sleeves were tucked in belts. Arddun and Gwladus could barely keep up with filling the cups and Hunric's wife, inarticulate with mead, was shaking a broken-stringed lyre as though it were a choking baby.

It was like being inside a lyre, inside a drum, inside a pipe. Hild thought her head might burst.

The music was like a living stream, pulsing beneath bodies, collecting thickly in dark corners, vibrating bone so hard it might have been cartilege.

The music was sinuous, insistent. She was moving with it again, swaying silver like a sleeping fish in its current.

This hand can birth children. This hand can make music. This hand can kill you.

The music, when it came, with a rish, a gush of voice seeking its note, ripped away her indifference and tore through her as sudden and shocking as snowmelt.