Robert Wyatt
You get lonely, and at certainpoints in your journey travelling companions can sort of join you. And I choose musicians as much because I really enjoy their company in the studio.
Working with Syd Barrett's a piece of cake. I found him courteous and friendly. I can't think of anything wrong with him.
With some of the black groups there was a terrific resonance with me. Not because they wanted to be anti-authority, but somehow the establishment didn't want them or accept them.
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.
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.
When I'm recording, I'm very shy of asking people, in case they don't want to do it, or in case they don't get the idea that I had in my head, and I'm too embarrassed to not use it. Also, it's expensive. If you're going to use other people, you have to pay them.
When I'm dying and finished, I'll just be croaking away nursery rhymes and they'll be the same basic, essential thing that was there all along.
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.
What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
What interests me is the whole composition, what is going on harmonically. I've been criticized by people in the past for not taking enough trouble to highlight the voice. In the mixing, I let it fight it out with the other instruments.
We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.
Underneath the kind of superficial differences of style, the kind of music's haircut, or the current clothes the music is wearing, when you're actually working on a piece of music with at least one good idea in it, that good idea is not really fixed or tied to a style or an idiom.
To me, the amazing thing was to discover the absolute beauty of Ray Charles singing a country and western song or something like that.
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.
This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.
There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.
There's always the worry about not earning enough money to be able to live on when you're too old to work as well as you'd like to be able to. So, just on that basic level, me and Alfie will be able to eat for the eat for the next few years.
There was a certain amount of resentment in the early '80s of the new kids on the block at that time, the punks and so on.
There is nothing criminal about being a businessman. It is certainly honorable, but your duties are to your shareholders and not to the public at large. It is not the duty of a businessman to run the world's schools and hospitals.
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.