Rocks Quotations | Page 8

The first time that I came to New York to work properly was the mid-'80s, but I was doing eight shows a week. You have no life. Going to a punk rock club - or whatever the music was at that time - would not have been on my agenda.

To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.

With buildering, I get to keep that element of danger. Plus, I very much like the feeling of height, and buildings have even more of a feeling of height than rock faces.

There's room in the world for one historical folk-rock singer to make a decent living, and I happen to be it.

Only two to three per cent of an audience is interested in words and pays attention to lyrics; most of the rest of it is about image or the beat or the sound, or else it's a tribal thing - country & western, rap, heavy metal, with historical folk rock off in some kind of cult.

Ricky Nelson... I couldn't believe it when he died. He was a great rock star.

I've always just wanted to sing in a rock band.

Progression is important. I'm always going to play music in the general vein of rock'n'roll, but when I started I was very much associated with the West Coast lo-fi thing and I didn't want to get anchored in with anything that was just in vogue for the time being.

I got tired of the Ramones around the time I quit and I really got into rap. I thought it was the new punk rock. LL Cool J was my biggest idol.

I was 15 years old at university, studying economics and philosophy, and I saw a retrospective of Australian film. They were very raw. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' 'Gallipoli;' they were fantastic.