Jarvis Cocker Quotes

I'm jamming 'Black Sabbath Vol. 4' all the time. Zappa's 'Cruising With Ruben & The Jets.' A lot of Gong lately. Some Hawkwind. The Residents' 'Duck Stab' is amazing. Some Fugs. Lots of stuff, man. I'm pretty schizophrenic with records.

The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.

In the old days, maybe we'd come across Captain Beefheart, buy a record, go, 'This is great!' and notice how his music is evolving, changing, and becoming more complex, more radical. And we would follow that progression and see it reflected in the alternative culture it came from.

I've put out records over the years, whether it's with Blackfield or No-Man or Bass Communion or Porcupine Tree, that are pop records, ambient records, metal records, singer-songwriter records.

When I was growing up, I was always looking for the most willfully uncommercial music: Whether it was Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa or King Crimson, that's what attracted me.

Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

I like expansive stuff that has a lot of space in it, like some of the early Pink Floyd albums.

The Geezer album, Black Science, had a lot of keyboards and it did not work.

I'm into heavy duty, psychedelic, foreign music. That's what I like listening to.

The late sixties and early seventies were kind of a breeding ground for exciting new sounds because easy listening and folk were kind of taking over the airwaves. I think it was a natural next step to take that blissful, easy-going sound and strangle the life out of it.

When Talking Heads started, we called ourselves Thinking Man's Dance Music.

As a teen, I heard the second Velvet Underground album, 'White Light/White Heat,' and it was too much for my limited scope of appreciation. It was intense, but I didn't get it.

The Soft Machine's 'Volume Two' inspired me heavily. That record just feels like it was all done in the same breath. It's genius, and it's silly at times. But I love the fact that every time I listen to it, I listen from the beginning and want to play it out.

'Europe '72' was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years - being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.

I wanted people to say that our music sounds like Porcupine Tree, not that it sounds like King Crimson.

I guess you could call my music progressive, pop, rock.

I've always felt that all the music I've made is psychedelic, including Throbbing Gristle.

Tame Impala's music revisits a time when guitar effects and studio tricks were music's newest frontiers; when rock was barely old enough to drive and violently threw conventional ideas out the window.

Those late '60s early '70s bands would take it really far out and get super-weird.

When alternative music - which is supposed to be the standard-bearer of where white rock is headed - becomes either too cute or too manufactured, that's just really not good.

Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's foray into some artful excursions into some ethereal electric experiments. There was a lot curious activities emerging in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin back then developing some fiercely fuzzy of synth-like effects way outside the norm which really blew the lid off things.

I listened to a lot of King Crimson back in the day.

There would not be Skaters or Emeralds or any of these bands if it weren't for Double Leopards.

Hendrix was a different kind of guitar player. It was like, 'Holy cow, this guy can sing, he can play all this weird stuff... what is this?' It was a new kind of music.