Robert Wyatt
I'm grateful that people one-half or one-third my age are listening because if you look at magazines, you get the impression that people are locked into their own age groups.
I'd say that when I feel I've done my thing right, it's been my own material. When I did a bunch of singles later on which went onto a compilation, there was a track there called Born Again Cretin, which musically was in my own words.
I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar.
I was very pleased that the Italian government has refused recent pressure from Germany and Austria to stop admitting refugee Kurds. I don't think the previous Christian Democrat government would have any qualms about sending them back to hell.
I was very influenced by painters and artists, more than musicians, when I was a teenager.
I was in the U.S. in 1968, and there were several assassinations of major figures, and there was a war going on, and certainly there was a feeling that everything in culture resonated politically in some way. Black music from the jazz side played an important part in that.
I was brought up, musically, in the '50s. If you want eccentricity, and that kind of non-verbal world and those kind of weird signals that you have to pick up, you can't beat jazz musicians.
I was brought up with esoteric ideas and modern European music and Stockhausen, Webern, avant-garde poets, and all the kind of avant-garde thing in the '50s, before pop music-the beat poets, the avant-garde painters at the time, and so on.
I thought, well, what should I do that's just like the most unhip thing you can possibly think of? And I thought of the Monkees, and I did I'm a Believer.
I think there is something biologically utterly moronic about racists, because in the end they are advocating incest. Any biologist would tell you that's not a very good way to strengthen one's biological gene pool.
I think the people who did well, or are happy, in a youth industry, they define themselves out of the business after a decade or so.
I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.
I really liked them, not just Syd, but all of them. Roger was very important, I thought, his contribution. And so was Rick's organ playing. It was a good band. It became something else completely, obviously.
I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.
I play music a lot but on my own mostly, so it was nice to be around other people. There was a certain sense a relief in the physical act of just playing and being with other musicians.
I only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question.
I know people who grow old and bitter. I want to keep making a fresh start. I don't want them to defeat me. That would be suicidal.
I have no happy memories of that band at all now, because of the humiliation of being thrown out at the end of it. I never quite got my confidence back from that.
I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.
I have certainly been careless. Maybe it is just that I am a slow burner. Ideas take a while to sort of incubate, and then I sort of process them and that is how it goes. Perhaps other people work more in the trajectory of an athlete.