Musician Quotes

I love Neil Finn. I've loved everything he's done since Split Enz.

I can understand why those bands do it. It can be a hell of a lot of bloody fun. People are allowed to have a bit of fun after the age of 40, and a lot of them do need the money.

Glasgow is less polite than Edinburgh but that's a good thing - they keep it very real.

Whenever you play dance music, it serves a function. It becomes a utility; you have to worry about the tempos and what you're going to play for people. But when you're playing for listening, you're free.

Some of the wise boys who say my music is loud, blatant and that's all should see the faces of the kids who have driven a hundred miles through the snow to see the band... to stand in front of the bandstand in an ecstasy all their own.

I don't think you can replaces great themes. But I think people do want to hear fresh arrangements of them. They don't want to hear them played the same way all the time.

You can't learn pathos or profundity.

Yes, I mean like you know, having studied with Yehudi Menuhin that is like some direct route into Bach, because he was one of the foremost interpreters of Bach for the violin.

Why would you want to stand there waving a stick when you could be playing an instrument?

The Four Seasons was making me popular in Britain, but EMI America had no interest in making that happen in the States, so I just had a classical career there.

Menuhin was playing Bach on a fantastic spiritual level when he was a teenager.

Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

If you're playing within your capability, what's the point? If you're not pushing your own technique to its own limits with the risk that it might just crumble at any moment, then you're not really doing your job.

If you're not pushing your own technique to its own limits with the risk that it might just crumble at any moment, then you're not really doing your job.

If you do the same thing every night, that's the death of music.

I've learnt new scales through playing different types of music, like Indian raga scales, gipsy scales and harmonically-based jazz scales.

I'm always improving and I want to get better and never hit a plateau. I find it an amazing adventure.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.

I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.

Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.

I hate complacency. I play every gig as if it could be my last, then I enjoy it more than ever.

Your life is the same wherever you go.

We were on the cover of Women's Wear Daily, which was hardly rock 'n' roll, but it pleased me.

Pop music should be about young people.

Maybe I've got to admit that what I did here was enough. I can make some more films. Maybe I'll direct a film. Maybe I'll have my musical put on stage. But nothing, really, to be absolutely honest, competes with making a very successful pop band for 10 years of my life.

It's a shame because we experienced probably the greatest thing - in art, in pop - we'll ever do. And it would be good to sit around and talk about it.

I've been through Hell with some of the members of my old band, and Hell is highly stressful.

I've always thought that actors wanted to be pop musicians and pop musicians wanted to be actors.