Robert Wyatt
Being an artist, working in an attic-this may be a silly illusion, it's just a silly romantic dream, just like being a pop star.
As painters like Miro, Picasso and quite a few others got older, some of their paintings seem to become less and less sophisticated and more just like children's blackboard drawings. The needs of their younger years to be virtuosic seem to fade and leave a basic, primitive cave painter underneath.
Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.
Although my earliest education from my parents came from listening to early 20th-century conservatory music, my big brother played a lot of jazz records. But in the end, what struck me as the most exciting thing, was the central importance of the black contribution.
Although I say I like pop music and I love rock and roll, I've never been in the commercial world, never swam in the business end of it.
All the machinery that starts to come into gear, from management and touring and the whole way it's done, the musician becomes a fairly small cog in a machine where all these sort of semi-comatose people in the industry certainly come alive, and they certainly know how to act.
A lot of the rock thing came out of people who'd started out doing covers of versions of the English scene and the American scene, the Beatles and Dylan and so on, and then got more and more involved in instrumental virtuosity and esoteric ideas. I was really going the other way.