We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.
When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.
Whether I'm doing music or I'm walking down the street or I'm in a record store buying a record or I walk into a comic store and I'm buying comics or having a drink with my friends, it's the same me.
As far as my solo record, I don't want a gold record or anything, I'm happy to be small and to have the people appreciate the music who really like me for being me.
I don't have any particular goals in making a recording. In a way the recording is itself the goal. The music comes into my mind, and from there the main job is to give form to it.
My real passion is for opera. It was born and developed by listening to records, and my dream as a child was to record entire operas when I grew up, and this dream came true.
It's typical of record companies. They sign you because you're unique, and then they want to put you in a mold so they can sell records.
In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.
There's a guy at the record company who's 30, and he says, I would not listen to these songs except in this context. Somehow the recording process, the arrangements, make it more accessible.
More than half of all the hip hop record sales are white people, and I think that might be a result of my record helping people to accept hip hop.
Interested listeners have only to hear the recording to find out if those guys, who go to such pains to undervalue my work, are right. All people have to do is listen to realize it is a beautiful record.
I would go to radio stations and they were supposed to be interviewing me and playing my record and they would say, We're playing too many women right now, we can't play your record.
If you have no enemies think then that your own mother might have produced one.
Merit is often an obstacle to fortune; the reason is it produces two bad effects, envy and fear.
I don't think about records.
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
Anyone can produce a new fact; the thing is to produce a new idea.
I love producing. My dream as a producer is to be able to build a company that can be a safe haven for artists, for directors and for writers and actors to do what they do best and let them have final edit. I'd like to build something to that effect.
The more shows that are produced, the more writers are hired, producers are hired, actors are hired, directors are hired, it means the more people will get employed. It's better for the economy. It's a fantastic thing.
The majority of the cocoa that we eat, it is actually produced by young kids which are being enslaved in the plantations of the Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast is the largest producer of cocoa.
