The Music Next Door...

It’s a testament to [R. Kelly’s] ingenuity as a singer and songwriter that Love Letter doesn’t fizzle — even with the fly zipped up on his wildest eccentricities.

If you’re going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.

Yeah, [James Brown] just lays it down. Yeah, that is what I do. And to get back to American musicians. That’s what they’re really good at. If you say that to a British musician they just go ‘Err, what? What key’s it in?’ And I say ‘I don’t know the fucking key, just play back what I just whistled to you. Just do what I’ve fucking told you. And do it this way or that way and they just don’t get it. It’s Noel Gallagher syndrome. If it doesn’t sound like The Beatles, they don’t get it.

I think I’m a realist. Which people who don’t like me consider to be pessimism. It isn’t pessimism at all. If I was a pessimist I wouldn’t get up, I wouldn’t shave, I wouldn’t watch Batman at 7.30am. Pessimists just don’t do that sort of thing.

After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

Cabaret Voltaire is living proof that technology is best entrusted to people who don’t know how to use it.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of “culture.

You have to forget about what other people say, when you’re supposed to die, or when you’re supposed to be loving. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.

I’ve got ‘Metal Box’ and I think it’s superb, the only thing is, I have to put various amounts of weights on my stylus to stop the thing jumping…

Remember the immortal words of Chuck Berry: beware of middlebrows bearing electric guitars.