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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

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Robert Wyatt
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: January 28
Composer
Drummer
Musician
Recording Artist
Singer
Bristol
Gloucestershire
Robert Ellidge Wyatt
Come
Songwriters
Hard
Singer
Writing
Singers
Never
Naturally
Songs
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More quotes by Robert Wyatt

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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
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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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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
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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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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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The missing links in my life's work, no less!
Robert Wyatt
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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
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I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.
Robert Wyatt
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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.
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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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
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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'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
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The United States is a country where everybody can start again.
Robert Wyatt
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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