The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It's either 'rawk' or it's not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.
— David Bowie
You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.
Fame itself... doesn't really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.
All Montreal bands have around nine members, I believe.
I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.
When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn't live past 30.
I'm an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.
I feel confident imposing change on myself. It's a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That's why I need to throw curve balls.
I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs - that's where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that's very cool.
I'm wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It's a real enjoyment.
Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.
The skin of my character in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking.
An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.
Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I'm very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.
I'll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.
I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.
I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it's so essential that when I'm involved in the actual process, my so-called 'real life' becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.
I still derive immense pleasure from remembering how many hod-carrying brickies were encouraged to put on lurex tights and mince up and down the high street, having been assured by know-it-alls like me that a smidgen of blusher really attracted the birds.
I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.
As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn't really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn't have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.
All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.
I would dream. I focused all my attention on going to America. The subculture, James Dean, the rock n' roll, the beat writers.
I wanted to imbue Ziggy with real flesh and blood and muscle, and it was imperative that I find Ziggy and be him.
I think Mustique is Duchampian - it will always provide an endless source of delight.
What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.
These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that.
Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I'd become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling.
The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.
I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.
Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It's become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.
I don't crave applause. I'm not one of those guys who comes alive on stage. I'm much more alive at home, I think.
From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.
I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.
I've always tended to write songs prolifically.
When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.
Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.
GYBE are among my, erm, two favourite Montreal bands, Arcade Fire being the other.
I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me.
I knew that I was 'interesting' at 18 because I was aware that I could get away with doing things on stage.
I guess it's flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.
It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.
I'm very good at what I do, and I don't turn my hand to something unless I'm very good at it, frankly.
You get to a certain age, and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines; you're not going to get played on radio, and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.
I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.
I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.
I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I've done for 25 years. I don't need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.
Everything I read about hitting a midlife crisis was true. I had such a struggle letting go of youthful things and learning how to exist and have enthusiasm while settling into the comfort of an older age.
Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.
The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.
Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
