Beth Ditto Quotes

When punk came along, I found my generation's music. I grew up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, 'cause that was what got played in the house. But when I first saw the Stranglers, I thought, 'This is it.'

I always think the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as very, very important because they stripped things down.

The first Decline I did was out of sheer love and appreciation for the music. In 1977, it was more about bands, because punk was a new form of music. It was groundbreaking and political.

I made the big turnaround in the early Nineties when I started hearing all the tenth generation punk bands like Green Day and Offspring and all those people. It just made me fall in love with punk again and remember my roots, and since that time I've always wanted to do more of that kind of music again.

The first music I heard that made me put away my comic books and make music was original punk.

We were just a bunch of high school kids who got into the Ramones together.

There's a punk-rock attitude, clearly, to 'Hated.' There's even a punk-rock attitude to 'The Hangover,' I think. We start the movie with a Glenn Danzig song.

I love punk rock, The Clash, The Ramones, The Cramps. I love where it all came from, and music for my ears now, it has to have that same electricity, adrenaline and danger.

To me, Sid Vicious is cool. Super chill.

For some young people, their first experience ever hearing punk rock music was playing the Green Bay Packers on 'Madden'.

The last true punk band to get a major label contract was The Dickies.

The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.

I was in a little punk band and we put out a few punk records that weren't very political, at all.

It's not every day you get to create a band like the Sex Pistols, and what it changed, on a musical level. I love that we've done something that was important.

I think people are too hard on the Pistols. The Pistols started the whole punk thing and never saw much money.

I started listening to and playing other music in the '90s. It was after hearing other bands, like Bad Religion, cover Ramones songs that I started to like our songs again.

When punk rock came along, the one thing you were not supposed to be was musical.

I didn't really see the British punk movement, if that's what it was, as wildly original, because I had been listening so intently to all the New York music since 1973, really.

People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything.

In the early days, myself and my friends were into punk because we had no money, just very basic instruments and skills. It was more about the ethos and the energy.

Growing up, I always wanted to be in punk bands, so I'm really enjoying the harder, heavier element. It's always been my dream to have people moshing at my gig, kind of that really feral element of the music coming out more. I love crowd-surfing.

You put an old Misfits record on, and it sounds like it came out yesterday.

The whole punk scene is, of course, responsible for the Go-Go's ever getting created. Because before punk rock happened, you couldn't start a band if you didn't know how to play an instrument. But when punk happened it was like, 'Oh, it doesn't matter if you can play or not. Go ahead, make a band.' And that's exactly what the Go-Go's did.

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.

I was the first person to have a punk rock hairstyle.