Quote

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
Number
Youth
Nina
Numbers
Onward
Music
Charles
Thing
Rays
Made
Singers
Enjoyed
Jazz

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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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Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.
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There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.
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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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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.
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The cultural mix that's happened in the United States is wonderful! Funny enough, one of the most wonderful things about it is that there is no American race.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation.
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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.
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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.
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The missing links in my life's work, no less!
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The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.
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The United States is a country where everybody can start again.
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What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
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Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.
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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.
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