- I hate the clouds of po-faced sanctimony that all too quickly gather round musicians. I despise the arbitrary division between music that is allegedly fluff and that which is supposedly substantial. I firmly believe that all music has to be entertainment, because if it isn't entertaining first it's unlikely to be anything else second.
- For the same reason that I don't do karaoke I don't want to see Mamma Mia! (2008). This is not because I don't like ABBA. Only goats don't like ABBA. It's because I recognise that what's precious about ABBA is not the songs or the emotions in those songs. What I revere about ABBA is the precise interlocking of sounds that went into making half a dozen shimmering jewels of the recording artists craft. It's because I respect that craft that I know Meryl Streep has no business caterwauling over it.
- [on Phil Collins in 2010] His reputation isn't destroyed, no matter how many DJs make lame jokes about him. And he has always sold lots of records, regardless of what fashionable opinion thought. In fact in hip hop he's revered as one of the most influential white musicians of the last thirty years.
- Most DJs are a little bit mad. If they aren't when they begin their careers, then a few years sitting alone talking to people they can't see means they generally end up that way.
- I don't actually find Episodes (2011) all that funny (as in laughing) and it can be slow getting to its points, but I like what it tells you about the relationships between the British and the Americans in the entertainment business. The Brits like to think success is about cleverness. The Americans think it's about method. That's why their hit TV series last for years, not months.
- In the days before radio stations adopted the policy of playing records before they came out, the singles chart was exciting. It was exciting because records would make their way up and down the chart gradually in response to some perceptible quickening or slackening of the popularity of said records among the public. The minute records were getting played on the radio up to six weeks prior to release, the record companies could count on getting six weeks' accumulated demand, resulting in strong first-week sales and ensuring that any record other than a turkey went straight into the chart at number one. The minute the radio stations got tired of playing it, usually a couple of weeks later, it dropped straight out of the chart. As if by magic the charts turned from a cliffhanging battle between good and evil into a soul-withering list of record company priorities. If you want to know what killed Top of the Pops (1964) and Smash Hits, it was whoever was the head of Sony Music and the Controller of Radio 1 at the time. In the conservatory. With a length of lead piping.
- The BBC's music stations have a relationship with the music business that is a lot cosier than they would like Parliament to know. Any controller of Radio 1 can stand before a select committee and say his station is playing the records that the public have demonstrated that they like by buying. It's a lot harder to argue that you're playing the records that they are bound to like in six weeks' time, because you are, er, playing them. One is reflecting the market. The other is fixing it.
- It is interesting when you look at Kate Bush's career, it's a kind of contradiction of the theory that record companies are unsympathetic, cold-hearted manipulators of talent.
- I was tweeting yesterday about Face Value by Phil Collins. Somebody responded that it was underrated. Since it sold ten million copies I think it's a bit of stretch to describe it as underrated. Abused, yes, dismissed out of hand, sneered at for reasons that had nothing to do with music, all these would serve as descriptions, but not underrated.
- This is an extraordinarily good record. People think they know Phil Collins's Face Value, it's the butt of jokes from cheap comedians up and down the land, has been for years, since everybody decided that Phil Collins was a bit naff or whatever. It's a masterful record, this, in every respect.
- He [Phil Collins] came along at a time of huge explosion in media so everything was coming at you in places it hadn't been aimed at you before and I suppose he was overexposed, as were loads of people, Dire Straits were around about the same time and I suppose suffered similarly. But you know that shouldn't blind us to the artistry involved in this record [Face Value] and particularly the kind of funkiness he ought to get more credit for.
- If people could be condemned out of rumours in the music business, the jails would be full many years ago.
- It wasn't seen as being as sinister as it's seen as being nowadays. You would have huge rock names who would have girlfriends who were 16, 17 or possibly even younger and nobody would write about it. Nobody would particularly bother about it. I don't think people are any better or worse now than they were then, just that our hot issues are very different nowadays, the code of behaviour has changed.
- [in 1987] Marillion may represent the inelegant, unglamorous, public bar end of the current Rock Renaissance but they are no less part of it for that. "Clutching at Straws" suggests that they may be finally coming in from the cold.
- [when asked who is the greatest ever rock frontman] In terms of getting the maximum out of not huge gifts, Mick Jagger actually is absolutely astonishing because you can't take your eyes off him.
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