My favorite artist of the last 20 years is Lydia Lovless.

"By the time we got to 'I Believe in Me' in the set, I’d overcome my stage terror that was due to the crowd being 15 times bigger than anything we’d faced before. The audience that night seemed to be expecting much more than the average rock show. Outrageous behavior, exploding heads, the birth or death of punk, an epiphany. Maybe it was the same impression Johnny Rotten had an hour later when he asked the audience, 'Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?' " - Penelope Houston, the Avengers

"I think being a fan of a band is, in a way, the best sort of criticism, because you're prepared to give songs a chance. When you love a band, any bad song is forgiven as an aberration. Any song you half-like you'll play another four times to make up your mind about it. And actually, that's what music criticism should be, and it just isn't!"- Nick Hornby


"It's only music, not brain surgery. If you like it, buy it; if you don't, then don't buy it."- Wayne Coyne

"My friend Steve Miller, singer from the Fix, talks about it, y’know: 'I read about the first Birthday Party seven inch in Touch & Go and it took me six months before I could find it, and in that six months, I was like, beside myself wondering what it sounded like.' And then when he finally found it, it was as good as we said it was. I mean, that sounds stupid, maybe – you can’t find a record for six months – but that’s the way it was back then; you really had to be a student of the music, and you really had to want it. You had to drive all over creation to go to record stores: 'you got any boxes of 45s in the back?' Stuff like that – you had to be aggressive. You got a lot of good stuff that way."- Tesca Vee, the Meatmen

"If you have something to say and there's passion, intensity and heart in the content it can sometimes be done better than with a singer who is more technically gifted, it’s the same as on any musical instrument."-Raymond Gorman, That Petrol Emotion


"What people tend to ignore is that for every carefree redneck jam, there are a million country songs that wax nihilistic. There’s a deep melancholy that sews its way through much of the music, its roots digging deep into outlaw songs and ballads from time immemorial."

"I can't. I'm not playing sad fiddle here, but nobody is actually interested in America. It is pointless in me doing that. It's not that it's soul destroying. I loved playing Los Angeles, but it's fucking hard when you are impotently travelling throughout a country that doesn't know your stuff and isn't particularly interested...."-Bob Geldoff


Speaking of IRS Records, R.E.M opened for the English Beat when their album Murmur came out.

It was their first national tour, and we had just come off a tour with the Talking Heads. All of the Talking Heads were actually charming, but especially David Byrne. We would finish sound check, and David would come to our dressing room, and ask us, “Is everybody treating you okay? Do you need anything?” We weren’t used to the lead singer of the headlining group caring at all. We were very touched by that. Our next tour was with R.E.M., so after the sound check, I would go to their dressing room, and without the David Byrne impersonation, I would ask them if they needed anything. We started to become friends through that. Oddly enough, I heard from Mike Mills later that the David Byrne tradition was also passed on by R.E.M., so they would ask their opening bands if they needed anything, and they spoke to U2 about it, who also carried on the tradition, so David Byrne begat a whole legacy there." - Dave Wakeling,

"Maybe that’s the reason we still can play without being too much of a nostalgia act, because we never had one big hit. The songs are not purposefully obscure. They’re very direct, but they’re also not just pop songs. They have that element, but they’re not trying to kiss your ass. They are available." - John Doe



"I get very lost when I hear instrumental virtuoso music. I go well “it’s great” and some of them can put their personality there – especially when you see them live – but the best thing about punk rock was how it put the human element back into rock and roll, which the seventies entirely erased."-John Wright, No Means No

"A good general rule for a band attempting to make an album after re-forming would be to do no harm. Don't sully the past by making an uninspired update of your classic sound, don't try to be modern and come off sounding desperate...don't suck, basically."-Tim Sendra



As Danny says, ‘No one cares what music you like anymore.’ You can like a bit of house, a bit of drum’n'bass, Johnny Cash, Sex Pistols, Oasis… Alright, we don’t want to be beating each other up over it, but let’s have a bit of belief, a bit of faith in something. When I was into ELO, kids at school used to say ‘that’s rubbish’, and I used to think ‘they don’t understand me’ and it’d make you feel good."

“people get the feeling you’re no longer their little secret. They want you to be special to them, and they’re afraid you’ll be transformed into this Bon Jovi-esque thing. People thought we did, but that was their own misconception.”-Tommy Stinson


"All of music's subcategories are inconsequential. It's all about the sound."

"Major labels suck the poetry from your bones and fill the gaps with a cement made from cocaine and crushed teenagers"-Jem Kelly, Wild Swans, Lotus Eaters

"When I was young, you would save up to buy an album. It would take you a month. Then once you had bought it you wouldn’t put it on. You would stare at the cover for the day to glean as much information as you could (Laughs). You couldn’t get that much information pre-internet, only what you could glean from the ‘NME’ and the ‘Melody Maker’. It is all too easy now. "-Paul Simpson, Wild Swans

"Life is gushing all around...."

" I think that something happened to music when the idea was that everyone would like it. I think that’s completely unnatural. When we were on A&M, they told us that 25,000 records sales wasn’t very good and we were like, ‘That’s good enough for us!’ We’d feel very uncomfortable if more than 25,000 people bought our record. That’s more people than ever go to see any of the football teams I supported! But that was a failure. There’s a hierarchy in the music industry where you have all these people floundering around not making a living who are—to me— doing what they should do and doing a good job of it. And then you have these people who managed to hit on the magic formula—finding what it is that everybody wants and it’s all backwards. They should be punished for learning that secret. Paul McCartney should be taken out and punished."- Jon Langford, Mekons

"You can't be popular and have people 'get' [your concept]. Like Bob Dylan, when he finally had a top 40 hit, there'd be all these horrible guys drinking beer singing 'like a rolling stone.' The very people we're talking about who were intolerant to the outsider, the fringe people, yet it goes right over their head! But he could never popular if it required understanding what he was saying."-DEVO

"Can you imagine what Bert Blyleven would think if he knew that Sandy Koufax, Warren Spahn, and Tom Seaver voted for him to be in the Hall of Fame? See, you can't question that… I mean, I know if I ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I knew that Jeff Beck voted for me, I'd be delirious!"
—George Thorogood, February 2009

"Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. There are kids out there you've never heard of who believe they're punk rock. And they're right. They're in Norway or Kansas, and they don't think punk rock has run its course. Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it."-Patti Smith

"Fuck 'new music'," says Wynn, who takes great delight in telling how the band once had a gang of heavy metal bikers dancing and playing air guitars in front of the stage. "I have no heart for 'new music.' We're not a 'new music' band or a subversive, intellectual, Marxist, neo-psychedelic, heavy message band. We're a rock band, and if we can move someone, that's great. I used to like Gang Of Four, for instance, but they've turned too serious. If you want to start a revolution by appealing to a group of sovereign intellectuals, you're going to have a real limp-wristed revolution. If the Gang Of Four are really serious about changing world politics, they'd better get in there and talk to the real masses they're so in favor of. I don't mean to pick on them. The Gang Of Four is a great band, but this whole 'new music' garbage has divided people into either you're an intellectual and you like the bands the Village Voice writes about, or you're a pop dummy who listens to Hall & Oates. And you can't divide it like that. There are people who just want to be moved anyway they can."-Steve Wynn

"...You'll find out how a bunch of punk rock geeks somehow turned sleepy Seattle and its basement-beer-bred music scene into a worldwide phenomenon. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll eventually fall over, as we all did at the time. A ton of seriously killer music came out of the fuzz and fuck-all attitudes, and eventually money changed hands. But it was funny too. Still is."
—Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows, Minus 5, R.E.M.)



If you haven't listened to it, it's not old.

In speaking of influential, lest we not forget the transcendence of Motown

"Overrated" is so overused that it has no meaning

oo,ss.dd/2, my beautiful collection


My last.fm page

I'd rather talk about music I like than music I don't like.