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" It's great being an actor and being part of a play or a film where there's usually quite a big group of people who are collaborating, and your job is really to fit in and share that energy. With music, because I write the songs, it's a broader, more abstract process. "

Johnny Flynn

Music

Group

Job

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" Loads of verses don't make it into the finished song. "

" If you're in a garage band, it's about being better than the band in the next-door garage. But in the folk tradition, it's more a vibe of sharing. "

" I like really bad puns - proper, red-top, nasty puns - I find them funny. "

" The world that I know and the world that I come from is from the arts, and my wife's an artist, and I've been a musician since I left college, and there's tons of musicians I'd love to play. "

" My father was an actor. Both of my older brothers are actors. My younger sister is an actress. For me, that's my job; that's my craft. But then all through school and through drama school, I was gigging and running nights and playing in bands, and I just didn't want to let that go. "

Johnny Flynn

Sister

Father

" My dad was an actor, and he always said that work was work; you can't turn your nose up at it. We didn't have much money when I was growing up, and he had this real work ethic, which I inherited. "

" As a jobbing actor or musician, you have to take any work you can get. "

" I think the two are kind of synonymous for me; songwriting is like my form of diary making. It's how I process the world. Without doing that, I feel kind of lost. The characters that I play often come out in the songs and the challenges that they face, albeit in an abstract way. "

" When I first moved to London, there was talk of a folk revival, with annoying names like nu-folk that made me feel slightly ill. "

Johnny Flynn

Talk

Names

" I don't really write songs. They're just there anyway, chiseling away at the atmosphere, and suddenly they're like, 'Oh, thanks for coming. Thanks for finding me. We'll share each other now.' "

Johnny Flynn

Write

Now

" You might as well acknowledge what came before, because you can never do something wholly new. It's not unoriginal to make your references clear. "

" My guitar is a 1934 National Trojan. They call it a resonator, which is the guitar guys played in the honky-tonks before amplification. It's very loud. It's the type of guitar that Son House and Robert Johnson played. "

" Folk music - and what people are now perceiving as being folk music - is music that's quite close to the ground. The songs sound quite old, even if they're new. They sound like they've been sung by different people for years. "

" The pop industry is so well-practised at channelling young people's creative energy that I think it gets abused. "

" I imagine that, for most people, acting isn't something they think is a viable option, whereas for me, it was the most viable option. No adults around me knew how to do anything else. "

Johnny Flynn

Think

Most

" My only incentive is to write music that changes me, where the process of making it is a discovery and is true in some way, at that moment. "

" I just said, casually, 'You know, I passed up on auditioning for Einstein.' And my friend was like, 'You idiot, you have to do it!' She made me do it. I sent the tapes off assuming that somebody would say, 'Ha ha, very funny.' "

Johnny Flynn

Funny

Know

" I always love going to New York. "

" I really love a lot of early Sixties R&B, rock n' roll, and I love performing songs that have that power and soulfulness. "

" I think the truest things come from silence, but everything's always so clogged up with noise. If everything falls away, and you can truly listen to someone, giving them yourself and generosity, you can truly lose yourself in what they're saying. Like, not impose your ideas on what they're saying, but really tune into them. "

" Not listening is the reason for so many misunderstandings and conflicts. "

" I like getting older. I always looked younger than I was, and I found that people wouldn't give me the room to speak. The older I get, it's like, 'Oh, I'm still talking, and they're still listening.' "

" The moment you have children, it's like your heart gets out of your body, puts on clothes, and walks away. "

" Taking someone else's language and fitting it into your own speech - you learn a lot about other people's brains, doing that. "

" I like the idea of letting the music do its own work and the stories being more expressionful - if that's a word - in people's imagination. I've just got a thing about people and songs telling you how you should feel. "

" The reason I stopped music for a while and concentrated on theatre was that it was more conducive to parenting; having the days free was quite handy. I love them both. I hope I don't have to compromise one for the other. "

" I've been cast in a lot of comedies. I've done things like multi-cam sitcoms: you know, 'Seinfeld' type... not as good as 'Seinfeld,' but that kind of thing. I love that stuff. "

" It's not in the mainstream media, but across towns, it is amazing how there are small groups of people getting together and forming artistic collectives - they may not be being overtly political, but I'd say by channelling their energy into community projects, that's a valid political statement. "

" I'm not a funny person. "

" Westminster politics is very unattractive, and people are channelling political energy into more inward questioning - there are a lot of musicians whose songs are all about feeling, and it's almost like that's the only safe place to express yourself. "