Bill Wyman Quotations

I'm always shy in front of an audience, so I'm always at the back, in the shadows, just doing it. I don't like the front, the adulation.

I always got great respect as a bass player.

I have very interesting hobbies like archeology and photography.

You're always frustrated, you don't have the chance to do a song on the album, like the Beatles did with Ringo and George, or like Led Zeppelin, where everybody was given a chance to contribute. There never is a chance with the Stones.

Everything had to be done in-between Stones time.

I had a wonderful time with the Stones but after 31 years, I thought it was time to move on.

There are things that I am very proud of and there are things that you are not so proud of. But I think that applies to any musician.

But why is it that in music, anything more than 5 years old - apart from a few hits - is never played on radio to the young public?

I love to play smaller crowds with the Rhythm Kings.

I always listen to a lot of different music when I am working on a project.

I always say that I am very proud of the work that I did with the Rolling Stones and that I am also proud of what I have done with the Rhythm Kings.

I am much more my own man than I was when I was with the Stones.

I open events for museums and I do charity work and photography.

I was listening to music long before rock 'n roll.

My first record I owned was by Les Paul.

The Stones always tried to do the odd smaller gig when they could.

You never know what your next dig is going to find.

Because of the fashion, the young people don't have any access to the history of music, unless people like me revive it. There are very few people to revive it, because you can't earn any money doing it.

I didn't want to stay in the Stones, and be stuck in a position having to play a music I didn't like anymore and that restricted me from doing all the others things I'm interested in because of time.

If you are any competent musician, if you have creative ideas, ideas of songs, of arrangements, in a band like the Stones, where these 2 people do all the things, there is no freedom.

I live in a house that was built in 1480. It has a moat around it. It is like a little baby castle.

I have found two Roman sites in the area that I live in.

I have no restrictions, no limits, no musical history to live with.

I think anyone would want to see their favorite band in a small club over a large stadium.

The first records I heard were from Dizzy Gillespie and people like that.

With the Rhythm Kings, I can involve myself in arranging and producing the music as well as the choice of songs.

I can't really sing and play live, because I can't play bass efficiently and sing at the same time. If I concentrated on the vocals, I'd mess up the bass, and if I concentrated on the bass, I'd forget the lines.

It's all right leaping about the stage when you're 20 but when you get to 25 it gets a bit embarrassing

I don't make any money.

All of my books are about researching. I do all the research and I give it to a writer who can put it in the written word better than I could.

Companies spend twenty, thirty, forty percent of revenues on advertising to brand their product and to get, essentially, acquire customers cheaply. You get a lot of exposure on something like this.

You could put Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley on one side of the stage, and James Brown on the other, and you wouldn't even notice the others were there!

I'm not a musician, I just play bass.

When I record in a studio I don't use an amp. I go directly into the board, so I can get that very fat, full sound - which is my favorite sound.

Onstage I like to play with a an 18-inch speaker, which very few bass players do. I need that fat, underneath sound, which I've always had. It suits me admirably to do it like that, and I can imitate that sound by plugging directly into the board in the studio.

I'm not an upfront person. Being upfront is not my forte. I'm quite happy to stay in the back there with the drums, where I belong.

We usually do things a bit more jazzy.

So I was releasing this tension with my solo albums, but I didn't want to play music just for money.

My life is really full. I am really enjoying it.

People will say that they never heard any of those songs before but back then, no one had heard the obscure songs the Stones were doing.

If they were doing something special, like maybe a TV special for the year 2000, playing the old songs, then maybe I'll do it.

There are a lot of songs that I absolutely love what I did.

I resigned myself to this eventuality. After all, it was the musician's name first (he's a lot older than I am, certainly, and perhaps more famous), and . . . But then I remembered. . . . Bill Wyman the Rolling Stone wasn't born Bill Wyman. . . . His real name, Stones fans know, is William George Perks.

Our first time in America wasn't a very good tour because they didn't know us because we hadn't had a hit record.

Our record was at 98 in the charts when we went so no-one knew us, so people just didn't come to our shows - we'd be in a 10,000 stadium and there'd be 300 people there.

You can go to art exhibitions, from van Gogh or Leonardo, you can see the whole history of art in museums and exhibitions. You can see the oldest film that was ever made, etc etc, so why not the same with the music industry?

We don't sell so many records. When I make the album, I pay the musicians.

When you pick it up you realize that you are the first person to touch that object since someone left it there 800 years ago.

This small tour, playing clubs, where the music is best, and where the music was actually written for is not a way to make money.

We courted adversity, took risks, and drove mothers crazy.

Because I had to do everything in bits and pieces, I was never quite satisfied when I finished a solo album or a soundtrack because I knew I could have done them better if I could have focused on them 100% until they were done.

Everybody in the band does it for the same reasons, as I do, to have a good time and send the crowd home with smiles on their faces.

It would have been the first time the Beatles and Stones collaborated on stage I suppose. We have played together on record in the past.

The Rolling Stones' recorded legacy is unfortunately similar to that of many other rock stars of the 1960s -- a great burst of creativity that tapers off into a stretch (eventually decades long) of unremarkable (and sometimes downright awful) recorded work.

The Stones used to do that a bit. Sometimes we would pull a song that was ten years old out and put it on the album.

The Stones introduced all these young people to the blues music, and I'm doing the same thing.

I wanted a variety in my life but after a couple of years I thought that music is what I do so maybe I should start doing it again.

And that's why I opened that restaurant just to get some of it out of my attic, to put up on the walls.

The whole idea behind the band was to play music that we love.

It wasn't the be all and end all of my life.

It's like a record, when you make a record and you mix it and it sounds good and then it's mastered and you hear the mastering when it's all been heightened and all that and it sounds better still - it's the same thing with a book.

It's also great to work with people I've known for many years.

I want to be creative, more adventurous, and that's why I left.

I try to listen to the music channels but you hear stuff where people sing terribly out of tune and they play the wrong notes and chords.

The last ten years have been the best of my life.

In the Rhythm Kings I get to play smaller venues and to me that is the best part of it.

But in my band, I have 4 great singers, so why singing myself ?

I didn't do music for a couple of years; I just focused on other things.

I can dig in my garden and find stuff that dates back to the 1100's.

I came away thinking maybe we are not right for America, although I thought we were.