Ian Gillan Quotes

When I was a kid, there was so much talent outside of recorded music.

Yeah, I miss the Grateful Dead. I miss that groove. I miss the brotherhood. Absolutely. There's no doubt about it.

There's so much music in Austin, and it's all so different.

When we first met, I was trying to put a band together. I asked around at school for other guys who wanted to play in a band. Someone told me about a juvenile delinquent they knew who played bongos.

I run around, I listen to a lot of music, go to a lot of concerts. And when I see someone that gases me, I try to go out of my way to involve them somehow in what I'm doing or get involved in what they're doing.

Ever since I was really really little, I was just singing all the time. Like one of my favorite games when I was little would be to just have one of my sisters pick a title, and I would impromptu create that song.

My friends always had bands, and we would play together.

We've all had our thing. I listened to the Monkees when I was little kid.

The kids that are making the ghetto stuff I can't even reach are the ones that are inspiring me to play music for the other kids in the city they don't even know about. If I don't get those kids making music, there won't be an original kid DJing like me in five to 10 years.

Guys would hang out in groups just to be with the music.

I remember being a little kid sitting in the living room with my brother and some friends from around the neighborhood, and I would sit at the piano and as they were running around the room doing different things and being silly, acting out, I would actually play the score for it - the music that went along with it.

In cities like New York and Austin, there's much more of a social context for music than in other places.

There were no good bands in my town. You know, there's like this magic town where every kid started a band in high school, and half of them were good and have careers based on relationships built at that time? That wasn't what my life was like at all.

I had a couple of really cool friends when I was a kid, and we'd find cool music and movies and show them to each other. My friend Dennis had a copy of 'A Clockwork Orange' and he'd already seen it once, and he was like, 'We need to watch this.' I was sleeping over his house - and I think we were literally 15 - and we watched it.

Boy George was only 7 years old when I was hot in '68.

One summer, when I was elementary-school age, my neighbors and I built guitars and keyboards out of scrap wood, painted them in bright colors, and formed the cover band Lil' 'D' Duran Duran. We didn't make our own noise or even pretend to play our fake instruments.

We first started to rent old VFW halls in Philly or whatever; we rented kegs and did parties and played our own music. We had to find a way to do it because nobody else was helping us, and I think now it's important to keep those dialogues happening, those parties happening.

I just appreciate the love that I get and support from hip-hop.

Growing up in the '90s was the coolest thing to me.

My brother Steve, who was a few years older than me, had 'Bad' on tape, and I remember listening to 'Smooth Criminal' and just thinking it was the coolest thing ever. I must have been five or six at the time, and I remember walking around school by myself thinking I was Michael Jackson. I wasn't dancing, exactly - more like walking musically.

People think this is a competition between bands, when the reality is the more successful bands the better.

I still think I'm playing back home in the street in my town with my mates. That's why I love the game, and mostly, I don't pay too much attention to social media or look at stuff that's out there.

I saved up my pocket money when I was about five or six years old. I just wanted to buy a CD, and at that age, I didn't care about what it was, and I ended up buying 'The Teletubbies Say 'Eh-Oh!'' I started off strong.

That's one of the cool things about going to local bars: seeing what people are doing and jamming with them. I'm a huge advocate of jamming with others; you learn a lot. So I love to go and do that - even if people wipe the stage up with you.

Some of my biggest moments have been in jam sessions, but I don't want to talk about them. There were always other people involved.