Quotes About Music

I will continue to pursue my music and live my life with my family.

When you're young you don't think, 'This person is going to change your life.' But when you start recording your own songs, it comes back and reminds you.

I never took a lesson until I was 20, and I'm glad I had those years living the life of a normal person. I don't consider that time wasted.

One night I was sitting listening to some Hank Williams songs - and they'll change your life in a hurry.

It was people sitting in their little studios going plink, plonk, plink, plonk on one track, and then putting a vocal on the other or making a bass drum sound out of a synthesizer. Plus, we all started to listen to Europe rather than America, as that was where all the electronic experimentation was coming from, from Kraftwerk to Jean-Michel Jarre, from Telex to Yello, even the Yellow Magic Orchestra from Japan.

Midge Ure: In Slik, there were just girls in the audience. In Ultravox, the boys started to come too, in mackintoshes and moustaches. There were always lots of men at Ultravox concerts.

And if you think about Soft Cell, Depeche or Human League, these were people who didn't know what they were doing, there was no musicianship involved. There wasn't any training; it was people's ideas going straight down onto tape, without having to deal with all the niceties of being a good keyboard player, and it was this new whole new sound of electronic music.

The PMRC pressured the music industry to establish a rating system that would warn potential record buyers of sexually explicit and violent lyrics. Their purchases may as well have carried stickers emblazoned with 'THIS RECORD CONTAINS SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK'N'ROLL!

The eighties would continue to evolve, driven by ever more mutations of the LinnDrum, the Fairlight CMI, the 808 drum machine and various versions of the Roland synthesizer.

John Foxx: The point of using synthesizers on the first Ultravox records was to find out what these strange new instruments could do that hadn't been done before. I figured new instruments had always radically altered music in the past – for instance, the electric guitar. Here was the next major shift – the synthesizer.

Nick Rhodes (musician): My parents would often watch Top of the Pops with me, as they were quite turned on by knowing what was going on in the charts, and I remember they actually liked Bowie. They liked him so much they took me to see him when he played the Empire Pool in Wembley, in London, in 1976, on the Station to Station tour, not once but twice. I'd become such a fan, and he had become such a focus of what I thought I wanted to do with my life at the time.

Dave Stewart: In 1982, Annie and I went to Australia with the Tourists, but the band broke up and we ended up in a hotel in Wagga Wagga. I had a little black and yellow Wasp synthesizer and was making didgeridoo sounds. When Annie started singing along, we thought, 'Maybe we could make weird and experimental electronic music?' On the flight home, we split up as a couple but kept on with the music, carting the gear in a second-hand horsebox.

Marc Almond: David came along with this thing called a synthesizer, which at that time we only really knew from the likes of Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, who had huge banks of them. Eno had used one in Roxy Music, and I remember them on The Old Grey Whistle Test playing a ten-minute version of 'Ladytron', one of the greatest things I've ever seen on television.

Neil Tennant: The whole renaissance of British pop starts with Gary Numan and 'Are "Friends" Electric?'. He took the David Bowie thing and reduced it to a black shirt and a pair of black jeans.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

"My name is Margalo," said the bird, softly, in a musical voice. "I come from fields once tall with wheat, from pastures deep in fern and thistle; I come from vales of meadowsweet, and I love to whistle."

I'd never seen a guy my own age play the piano. It was like sex and musical theatre fused together.

People with money love Gershwin.

How amazing to be able to play an instrument, Jule thought. Whatever happened to you, whatever else went on in your life, you could look downat your hands an think, I play the piano. You'd always know that about yourself. It was like being able to fight, she realized. And being able to change accents. They were powers that lived in your body. They would never leave you, no matter how you looked, no matter who loved or didn't love you.

The music was turbulent. It made her feel as if the sky was about to break open, and as if Mikey not loving her and Toby being an addict were being pushed through the music into the sky.

Like every true performer, she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire.

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.

For my understanding depends not only on my expectation and experience of possible types of music, but also on my knowledge of possible types of painting-in other words, on the mental set with which I approach the Mondrian.