Top 1200 British Music Quotes & Sayings

You certainly don't hear any country music on pop radio today. But for a while you did, and it was a lovely thing to have all the different genres of music cohabitating the Top 40 - the folk sound, The Beatles, the British sound, the Motown sounds, that kind of light country - it was a welcome relief after a few hard rock records. Everyone was sharing the airwaves, and I think it was a beautiful time for American music.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

I have been long associated with British music. I have favoured it as my alternate music next to American.

British blues was my favorite music, and it still is.

The British press hate a winner who's British. They don't like any British man to have balls as big as a cow's like I have.

I know I'm British. I haven't spent much time in the U.K., but my parents are British, my family heritage is British, so if I wasn't British, what would I be? I am British.

I think my parents are the first influence on me music-wise. My dad was into Motown and soul, and my mom was into British '80s pop, like The Trashcan Sinatras. I grew up on that. It was great. They were the first people to really bring music into my life.

A lot of the time, the British press make me ashamed and embarrassed to be British. They give others the impression that the British are selfish, envious and bitter people, which is simply not true in my opinion. I think that British people in general are really nice and friendly.

When I was a very young kid, the first music that really turned me on was a new wave of British heavy metal - big, dumb rock music. There was a band called Diamond Head - they were basically the band that inspired Metallica. But I also liked bands like Saxon and Iron Maiden.

The British may not know much about music, but they certainly loves the noise it makes.

'Viceroy' is the first British film about the Raj and the transfer of power from Britain to India made by a British Indian director. It is a British film made from an Indian perspective.

If you sit down with British officers or British senior NCOs, they understand the sweep of history. They know the history of British forces not just in Afghanistan but the history of British successful counter-insurgencies - Northern Ireland, Malaysia.

There's always peripheral things that you like that you don't know, but starting with whatever his British influences are, are some of my favourite artists, and the American things are what I grew up on as well. In the end, for me, it's those foundations of the music business - those things that are a lot of the foundations of what music today is. You can hear a bit of all of those things that we talk about in almost all music today.

There are no countries in the world less known by the British than those selfsame British Islands.

The whole British music scene of the mid-sixties had a pretty profound effect on me.

In the past, people couldn't place me. They thought that I was Danish or English or French. They never got that I am Italian. I'm not typical, maybe because my visual education was very mixed. There was a lot of London in my aesthetic: The Face, i-D, British music, and a lot of British fashion . . . But I really enjoy this contrast.

My dad hates reggae. He's from St. Kitts, which is a really British island, with Victorian values. He doesn't have a strong Caribbean accent. He didn't play Caribbean music in the house. He was really into soul music, collecting soul 45s.

Being British, I don't really have a way of expressing myself in conversation. Music transcends language.

I'm the British home secretary. My job is to protect the British public.

I didn't like any British music before The Beatles. For me, it was all about black American music. But then I became a successful pop singer, even though the kind of music I liked was more elitist, which is what I'm trying to get back to.

The British like any kind of music so long as it is loud.

I must fight unto the death the unholy attempt to impose British methods and British institutions on India.

I've heard Jerry do mini concerts while driving, especially when the music of The Beatles or a handful of other 'British Invasion' bands aired. Hearing Jerry Lawler sing with a British accent is quite an experience.

British people are surprised that I'm British! It's extraordinary, I get tweets every day from British people saying, 'I had no idea you were British.'

When I was younger, I was in love with everything about the British Isles, from British folklore to Celtic music. That was always where my passions were as a young girl, and so I studied folklore as a college student in England and Ireland.

I know Im British. I havent spent much time in the U.K., but my parents are British, my family heritage is British, so if I wasnt British, what would I be? I am British.

I have to admit, I am aware of my Latin roots now. In the past, people couldn't place me. They thought that I was Danish or English or French. They never got that I am Italian. I'm not typical, maybe because my visual education was very mixed. There was a lot of London in my aesthetic: The Face, i-D, British music, and a lot of British fashion . . . But I really enjoy this contrast. I can go from Lady Gaga to Brian Eno in a split second.

British audiences are toughest on British films. So often, a British film is the last thing they want to see. If you please them, you really know you've made an impact.

When I was 13, listening to Choice FM, I would listen to a lot of R&B from America, and whenever a British person tried to do it, it didn't really work, they just sounded like they were trying to copy that whole style. Now the music sounds British, something real rather than an imitation.

It is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

It seems to me that the Conservatives neither recognise the scale of the living standards crisis facing British families nor offer credible answers as to how the British economy or British society can be better in the future.

I just like the lineage and the heritage and the fact that British dance music is still progressing. I'm from London; I love London, and I wouldn't know how else to show that love in musical terms. There's something about British stuff that's a bit faster, a bit harder-hitting. Just tough.

In the late 1930s, both the British and American movie industries made a succession of films celebrating the decency of the British Empire in order to challenge the threatening tide of Nazism and fascism and also to provide employment for actors from Los Angeles's British colony. The best two were Hollywood's Gunga Din and Britain's The Four Feathers...

Bill Monroe spoke of bringing 'ancient tones' into his music with echoes of British and Irish fiddle and bagpipe music, while also delving deeply into American blues, gospel, folk hymnody, and hill country dance music. To that gumbo, he added the invigorating rhythms and harmonies of hot jazz. It was a new kind of American music, named in honor of his band The Blue Grass Boys to be known, simply, as bluegrass.

Technically it was a victory for the British, who attacked the patriot fortifications but a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was: out of 2,200 British soldiers 1,034 were killed or wounded, including one in nine of all the officers the British lost in the whole war.

The British Army should be a projectile to be fired by the British Navy.

My family come from Cyprus. Both my father and my grandfather worked on the British bases there, and as the British government granted independence to Cyprus, they granted British passports to those who worked with them.

I do not think the British want to become America's "Airstrip One," as the British Isles are called in George Orwell's "1984." The EU's internal market was a massive success even before the UK joined it, and it joined because there was no real alternative. So while British tabloids are expecting to be punished by Germany, Brexit is punishment in itself.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

The British are proud of their ability to create a muddle and then muddle through all difficulties. I must shake the British pride: muddle is not an exclusively British institution. Read descriptions, for instance, of the over-organized, wonderfully systematic and "thorough" German war machine during the last war.

No British politician has ever been more despised by the British people than Margaret Thatcher.

The story of the British empire helps to explain the roots of most British people: white, black, and Asian.

However British you may be, I am more British still.

Let's turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.

People ask me if I'm influenced by British music, and I suppose I grew up listening to mostly British music - from new wave stuff through to heavy metal. Like, when I got into metal, it was Black Sabbath. I never really got into a lot of American rock. I appreciate some of it, but not much! Most of the great new wave music was coming out of Britain, and Germany. So maybe those influences have made their way into my music, and perhaps that's why I have this connection with people in Europe. But maybe it's something cosmic.

All the best British groups were inspired by black American music. With The Beatles, it was Motown and the blues. With me, it was a mixture of British styles and the more sophisticated Seventies soul of Barry White and Marvin Gaye.

The British often shy away from any cinematic interpretation of real sex. They sometimes have what I call "subtle sex," which is really introspective and has soft music in the background. Either that or it's played for comedy. The British are kind of hung up about sex. They find it kind of titillating and they make jokes about it because they're nervous.

It is a fallacy to believe that a Republic of any kind can be won through the shackled Free State. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The Free State is British created and serves British Imperialist interests. It is the buffer erected between British Capitalism and the Irish Republic.

I do consider myself British. I have very strong feelings about my British heritage.

Well British pension funds have not been investing the savings of British people in British infrastructure.

I don't enjoy British shows as a rule because British audiences are strange.

The music that I first fell in love with was American music, really. Nothing against British acts - I love them and will forever - but on the whole, it was the art of American storytelling in the kind of folk and blues lyrics that, if you scratch a little bit, there's a heartbreaking story there.

We think of the revolution ending in Yorktown, Va. The fact of the matter is that the French defeated the British in a naval battle right in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Because the British fleet was coming to rescue Cornwallis, the British general, Washington was able to surround Cornwallis.

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.

Well, I'm British. I'm proud to be British and I love this country. I'm going nowhere.

In British music, you have indie, rock... Grime is now one of those pillars. It's a foundation of British music.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

Californians don't have that marvelous British cynicism, but then the British can be so patronizing at times.

'MaerskKendal' is a rarity with its British flag, the 'LONDON' home port painted on its bow, its two British chief officers, and its portrait of the queen in the mess room, apparently common courtesy on British ships, but a little alarming to me.

Before Cliff (Richard) and The Shadows, there had been nothing worth listening to in British music.