Robert Wyatt
I have a fantastic admiration for really good pop musicians, just straight commercial pop musicians with no hip associations of rock at all.
I get nearer and nearer towards happiness, or a feeling of being relaxed and free, when I can lose myself in my environment.
I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.
I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away.
I enjoyed the opportunity to record Moon In June, and to get that onto tape. The first 10 minutes of that I played myself. I had a chance to sort of double-track instruments.
I don't think it's necessary for a painter to invent the things that he paints. If you paint a tree, it's your painting of the tree, it's your choice of color, what you put in and leave it. If you really work it through-interpreting something-it's you.
I don't know how many thoughts we have a second, but it's quite an amazing number, and just to pin down the appropriate sequence of those, all you really need is a pencil and a piece of paper.
I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.
I don't feel that I'm very adaptable, that I particularly go with the flow of new ideas. I just don't feel I've mined my own scene properly and fully yet.
I don't do live things.
I did three songs on an LP by John Greaves on a label called Resurgence based in Newcastle. That was with some French musicians.
I always have to work something through my system until it's absolutely in my own dialect and it's comfortable to me.
I actually only liked Virgin when I thought it was a kind of small-scale, cottage industry-type record company. I didn't realize that they were just using that as a way in. They wanted to be a big posh record company with pop acts just like everybody else.
Gilmour, as far as I can see-I don't know much about guitarists, really, but he seems like as good as a rock guitarist can be. But he's very much a man of the world. He's very at home in the world of power and money and so on, and he can deal with it. Syd Barrett fans shouldn't resent him.
For me, the overall experience-I came out of it without much self-respect, without any money, without anything, really. So I haven't dwelt on it too much.
Everything I do is totally personal. I don't really have a lot of control over what I write when I'm writing it.
Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.
Engineers... don't like scruffy noises. They like to clean it up and get everything sounding really pristine clear because this is going to go in their CV, and they don't want another engineer to hear them on a record which doesn't sound all clean and tidy. And my music isn't clean and tidy.
CDs are too long! I learned my craft on LPs, which is basically two chunks of 20 minutes. CDs somehow, you need more than that.
Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.