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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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Robert Wyatt
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: January 28
Composer
Drummer
Musician
Recording Artist
Singer
Bristol
Gloucestershire
Robert Ellidge Wyatt
Power
European
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Anti
Government
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More quotes by Robert Wyatt

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There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.
Robert Wyatt
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Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
Robert Wyatt
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I don't do live things.
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 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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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 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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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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Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you 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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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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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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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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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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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
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What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
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 who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.
Robert Wyatt
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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
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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