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" I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really. "

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" I play music a lot but on my own mostly, so it was nice to be around other people. There was a certain sense a relief in the physical act of just playing and being with other musicians. "

Robert Wyatt

People

Musicians

Music

" 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. "

" I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers. "

Robert Wyatt

Nature

Solitary

" It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic. "

" Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't. "

" There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz. "

Robert Wyatt

Jazz

Number

" I only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question. "

" Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less. "

Robert Wyatt

Less

You

" I really liked them, not just Syd, but all of them. Roger was very important, I thought, his contribution. And so was Rick's organ playing. It was a good band. It became something else completely, obviously. "

" I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer. "

" The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture. "

" In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made. "

" I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song. "

" When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice. "

" When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion. "

" If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy. "

" In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead. "

Robert Wyatt

Work

Group

" I think the people who did well, or are happy, in a youth industry, they define themselves out of the business after a decade or so. "

" Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world. "

" I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry. "

" I know people who grow old and bitter. I want to keep making a fresh start. I don't want them to defeat me. That would be suicidal. "

" I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest. "

" I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap. "

" We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise. "

" I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology. "

Robert Wyatt

Youth

Fashion

" 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. "

" On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers. "

" There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas. "

" My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth. "

" I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer. "