Robert Wyatt
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's sort of hard to do originals when you can't even play properly.
It's not a snobbishness, this thing about commercial stuff. It's just the fact that it seems to have a momentum all its own, and there seems to be demands made on it. You know how it is with Hollywood films-they're really accountant-led.
It's been very good for me to have been asked on various things, but in the end it surprises me. I just try and do the things that people ask me to do. It's nice, in a way. I don't have the responsibility for the final thing.
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.
It just doesn't 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.
It doesn't really matter what era I'm in. Because I haven't ever really felt quite in an era, I don't feel out of one.
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.
In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.
If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.
I've reduced the amount I do, rather than increase it.
I've never been any kind of patriot, including not a cultural patriot. So I have no problem with new immigrants bringing new ideas. I'm happy about that.
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.
I'm terminally kind of sad, but I'm also fed up with... very often, younger acts, particularly, sing with angst and sort of work themselves up into a psychosis of bitterness and anxiety. It's a well-known phenomena.
I'm still trying to do the same thing, only get it right!
I'm recording at Phil Manzanera's studio. A really nice bloke. We have mutual friends like Bill McCormick and Brian Eno.
I'm quite limited in what I can do, so sometimes I just have to say no, not because I don't like it, but because I just don't think I can do justice to the idea of the song.
I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
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.
I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.