Joe Cocker Quotes

When you get onstage, you can see everyone in the audience's face, down to the detail. You can see who may or may not be yawning.

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.

We've been in front of really big audiences, and people have said there's a couple of hundred thousand people out there, but I've never really noticed.

I grew up on the side of the stage. I never had a fear of an audience. I never felt like they were separated from us. We were all in the living room, and it happens to be a big living room. I continue to operate on that assumption.

I like to talk to the audience once the show starts, as much as possible, and feel connected to them. I don't feel quite as nervous when I do that because, then, you feel like they're on your side.

My ideal setting is I walk from the streets, backstage, and straight onto the stage. Two minutes, and I am on the stage. That way, in my head I have gone from my world and then into a social setting with my friends.

Just me onstage with a mike having an intimate relationship with the audience. I don't get nervous for that. I just get excited.

Confronting a stadium audience, you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and, of course, you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either, so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.

We just did what we'd done when we were an act in the '60s. But I found it impossible to hold a dialogue with 500,000 people. In a certain sense, it was numbing.

I don't get stage fright, I actually love the energy, I love the spontaneity, I love the adrenaline you get in front of a live audience, it actually really works for me.

When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.

Being on stage makes me come to life. When all eyes are on you, they're watching every move you make.

Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.

Sometimes, the most daunting thing about performing is making eye contact with your audience, so just look above them and at the corners of the room. Soon, you'll totally forget they're there.

Being in front of all these people staring at you and it helps you to dig down and become more emotional and get lost in it as you're feeding on people's energy.

When I performed at 'Open Mic U.K.' I had this connection with the audience that I'd never felt before, and I loved it. It was my first big thing, and looking out into the crowd... was just amazing.

I've never not appeared in front of a live audience for any longer period than a month or two.

There's some anxiety the 30 minutes before the show starts. But once you step on stage and face the people, everything goes away, and you have fun and enjoy the audience.

When you're on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn't exactly a sound - it's a hum, like the streets.

Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.

Once I'm on stage, the energy of the crowd wipes my nerves away.

If you have a recital to do, you have to memorize the songs. I never use music when I do recitals. It produces an instant barrier, both for yourself and the audience.

I think the challenge is going out in front of a paying audience with absolutely nothing and trying to entertain them for two hours. Thankfully, I only think about that right before we go on, and then once we're out there, everything's fine.

I played shows in front of like 25, 50 people, and it's a lot harder to do your thing in front of a crowd that's small.

Performing 60,000 people, that's easy. The energy's already there. They're already doing most of the work. All you gotta do is not forget the words - and feed them energy, too.