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“Songwriting
is about counterpoint. Counterpoint is the key. Putting two disparate images
beside each other and seeing which way the sparks fly. Like letting a small
child in the same room as… I don’t know… a Mongolian psychopath or something.
And just sitting back and seeing what happens.Then you send in a clown, say on
a tricycle. And again you wait, and you watch. And if that doesn’t do it… You
shoot the clown”.
“The first
time I saw Susie was at the Victoria and Albert museum in London, and when she
came walking in, all the things I had obsessed over for all the years, pictures
of movie stars, Jenny Agutter in the billabong, Anita Ekberg in the fountain,
Ali MacGrow in her black tights, images from the TV when I was a kid, Barbara
Eden and Elizabeth Montgomery and Abigail, Miss World competitions, Marilyn
Monroe and Jennifer Jones and Bo Derek and Angie Dickinson as police woman,
Maria Falconetti and Suzi Quatro, Bolshoi ballerinas and Russian gymnasts,
Wonder Woman and Barbarella and supermodels and page 3 girls. All the endless
impossible fantasies, the young girls at the Wangaratta pool lying on the hot
concrete, Courbet’s Origin of the World, Bataille’s bowl of milk, Jean Simmons’
nose ring, all the stuff I had heard and seen and read. Advertising and TV
commercials, billboards and fashion spreads and Playmate of the month, Caroline
Jones dying in Elvis’ arms, Jackie O in mourning, Tinker Bell trapped in the
drawer. All the continuing, never-ending drip-feed erotic data came together at
that moment in one great big crash-bang. And I was lost to her, and that was
that.”
“It’s your
limitations that make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are.”
“All of our
days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better
than to not act at all, because the worth of an idea never becomes apparent
until you do it.
Sometimes this
idea can be the smallest thing in the world – a little flame that you hunch
over, and cup with your hand, and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm
that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame, great things can be
constructed around it that are massive, and powerful, and world changing. All
held up by the tiniest of ideas”.
“In the end,
I'm not interested in that which I fully understand. The words I have written
over the years are just a veneer. There are truths that lie beneath the surface
of the words...Truths that rise up without warning, like the humps of a sea
monster... and then disappear. What performance and song is to me is finding a
way to tempt the monster to the surface, To create a space...Where the creature
can break through what is real and what is known to us. This shimmering space,
where imagination and reality intersect... this is where all love and tears and
joy exist. This is the place.This is where we live”.
*
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