Robert Wyatt Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Robert Wyatt

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. — Robert Wyatt

I get slightly irritated by people who say they're natural rebels because it just means that they're going to be against whatever anybody does, which is almost like saying you might as well leave it as it is. — Robert Wyatt

The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality. — Robert Wyatt

I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law. — Robert Wyatt

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

There are people I would like to work with. It's a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I can't really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing. — Robert Wyatt

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

I don't know how many thoughts we have a second, but it's quite an amazing number, and just to pin down the appropriate sequence of those, all you really need is a pencil and a piece of paper. — Robert Wyatt

The missing links in my life's work, no less! — Robert Wyatt

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. — Robert Wyatt

What I like about popular culture is its accessibility, and I've covered popular songs because they are amazing things. — Robert Wyatt

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. — Robert Wyatt

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. — Robert Wyatt

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

I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I'm just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left. — Robert Wyatt

Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism. — Robert Wyatt

Potentially, America is really the greatest, but it's not yet, I don't think. It's too much like an old-fashioned empire, waving the stick and dropping too many bombs on too many people. — Robert Wyatt

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. — Robert Wyatt

Drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble. — Robert Wyatt

When I'm singing I try not be a singer with a capital S. I just try to get it out so I feel comfortable with it. — Robert Wyatt

I don't want to be a professional cripple. And I don't see the suicide stuff as tragic. — Robert Wyatt

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

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. — Robert Wyatt

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. — Robert Wyatt

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. — Robert Wyatt

Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there. — Robert Wyatt

This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome. — Robert Wyatt

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

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas. — Robert Wyatt

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. — Robert Wyatt

I do think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world. — Robert Wyatt

I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest. — Robert Wyatt

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

I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing. — Robert Wyatt

We've all got to earn a living. And writing songs is what I do. But when I've done a record, it's not that I think it's better or worse than anyone else's, but if I think that nobody else would have done it if I hadn't, well then that's ok. — Robert Wyatt

What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation. — Robert Wyatt

People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway. — Robert Wyatt

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

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. — Robert Wyatt

I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer. — Robert Wyatt

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

Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power. — Robert Wyatt

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

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

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. — Robert Wyatt

People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back? — Robert Wyatt

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

I would encourage people to realize that you don't have to panic if you're not part of a mainstream, or if you find yourself outside the flow. If it doesn't suit you, don't go along with it. Just sit it out and get your stuff done. Don't just sit moaning or getting drunk - I spent some years doing that. But if you can just come up with something of your own, however minor it is, that's going to be easier to live with when you're at the end of your life. — Robert Wyatt

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. — Robert Wyatt

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done. — Robert Wyatt

I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar. — Robert Wyatt

I maintain that the greatest crime committed by America - with the possible exception of the carpet-bombing of Laos - was the Disneyfication of Winnie The Pooh. — Robert Wyatt

There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night. — Robert Wyatt

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

I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry. — Robert Wyatt

I don't do live things. — Robert Wyatt

It just doesn't mean anything to me, the high-profile, big money side of things. I just want enough to live on, and to be able to get on with what I do, and hang around my friends. — Robert Wyatt

Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience. — Robert Wyatt

People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know. — Robert Wyatt

I looked at what adults were doing and how they wanted to earn money, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to go away. — Robert Wyatt

People have habits about what they think songs should be like. There's the folky thing of: "Poor me, I'm a sensitive person in a cruel world." Or the pop thing of: "Hey, look at me, I'm sexy." — Robert Wyatt

On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers. — Robert Wyatt