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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

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Robert Wyatt
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: January 28
Composer
Drummer
Musician
Recording Artist
Singer
Bristol
Gloucestershire
Robert Ellidge Wyatt
Youth
Nina
Numbers
Onward
Music
Charles
Thing
Rays
Made
Singers
Enjoyed
Jazz
Number

More quotes by Robert Wyatt

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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
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Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
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The United States is a country where everybody can start again.
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The gap between rich and poor is, in fact, widening enormously. This idea of building up the powers of people who are already powerful and keeping everyone else back is a recipe for endless misery and conflict.
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I don't do live things.
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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.
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What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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
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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.
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There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.
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I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I'm just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left.
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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.
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The missing links in my life's work, no less!
Robert Wyatt
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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
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I just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.
Robert Wyatt
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There are people I would like to work with. Its a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I cant really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.
Robert Wyatt
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The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.
Robert Wyatt
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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?
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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