Quote

I was working in, being a single parent with a grieving child of five years old. It was horrendous. I couldn't go out much, because I had my daughter to look after. So people used to come round, and Tony Harrington from The Wire came round.

David Toop

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David Toop
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 5
Composer
Jazz Musician
Journalist
Music Journalist
Musician
Singer
Writer
New York City
New York
Used
Daughter
Look
Couldn
Come
Single
Horrendous
Looks
Parent
Tony
Children
Came
Wire
Much
Child
Grieving
Years
Five
Round
People
Working
Rounds

More quotes by David Toop

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I had the idea to do an anthology about instrument-making.
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I was at a time of my life of making choices, I suppose: am I a writer, am I a visual artist? And when I was a teenager. I thought I would be a film-maker. Am I a musician? If so, what kind of musician am I?
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The longer we live, the more we are obliged to confront the deeper meaning of what it is we do.
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New ideas emerge of their own free will if they are allowed to.
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I think I was like [a game of] skittles, knocked apart by this wooden ball, and there's a strength to that: you're not too self-conscious about what you're doing, so you're not too worried about it.
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I needed a huge amount of energy to cope with my life. I had a huge amount of energy where stuff was concerned: it was as if all this unconscious material had been unleashed.
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Logically there is nothing new to say about the New. Or maybe it's just a problem of articulating unfamiliar perceptions.
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Like a fly bouncing uselessly off a closed window, I'm caught at a moment when the effort of finding new ways to perceive the world feels just out of reach for me.
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I'd entirely forgotten about Pass The Distance, and then I went to Japan in 2000, and was asked to do interviews with all these journalists, who were showing up with bootlegs of this record, asking me to talk about it. I was astonished. It kind of gained momentum.
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Every time when it comes to writing a book, I think, I'm the last person in the world that should be doing this, I don't know anything, I can't do this. And I went through years of that with Into The Maelstrom.
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If you run out of new ideas when you are very young, then it's a problem of talent If you run out of new ideas when you get older, it may be that there's nothing left to say, or it may be that core ideas demand repeated attention.
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At that time, 73 and 74, I became aware that there were a number of us making instruments. Max Eastley was a good friend and he was making instruments, Paul Burwell and I were making instruments, Evan Parker was making instruments, and we knew Hugh Davies, who was a real pioneer of these amplified instruments.
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I'd just written the book Ocean Of Sound, and this terrible thing happened in my life: my wife committed suicide. I was a single parent because of that I was completely shattered. I had a book that I'd just finished that had been produced through a really, really terrible period, but I had managed to finish it.
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Sometimes I'd like everybody who is stuck, or lost, or vacant to stay that way and keep silent for as long as it takes, but that's the critic in me talking.
David Toop
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I don't mean I give the same intensity to everything I do - if I did that, I'd be dead, but I'm very conscious, I make notes, and I have a fairly good idea of what's happening in my life.
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Paul [ Burwell] and I had also got interested in making books. We'd been working with Bob Cobbing, the sound poet, since the beginning of the 70s, and Bob had this press called Writers Forum.
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I do still have dips of confidence or [can think] everything I do is rubbish.
David Toop
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I had ideas about music and sound and listening and time and so on that I wanted to pursue as an individual, and by doing that book, Brian [Eno] opened the door, and he decided to do a record based loosely on the book.
David Toop
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People don't have to put you in a box. You can have the confidence to move across, and combine and learn from each different practice. They inform each other.
David Toop
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There's a sense of trajectories that are extraordinary about a life like this. You can reconnect with people and go back to playing with them after years and years of not even knowing if they're alive.
David Toop