A Quote by Julian Barratt

I was going to be a jazz-fusion guitarist. I came to London at one point with my mate, and we were going to make it. We spent three days there and went back home to our mummies.
I once took a ride to the beach in L.A., and all along the shore there were all these so-called jazz places. And I saw these college guys and session players playing this fusion Muzak stuff. It was just a lot of notes, and the more notes they played, the more it kept them from expressing anything. So I came back home and got out my Zeppelin albums.
People ask me to describe how I play, and the most obvious answer is that I'm a jazz influenced guitar player. But I'm not a jazz guitar player. Wes Montgomery was a jazz guitarist, Joe Pass was a jazz guitarist (laughs).
Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.
I was a very young 21-year-old. I was very scared. I spent three years at university in west London, and I went into central London three times. I came from Shropshire, and just having travelled that far was enough ambition.
For 'The Hotel' I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame...it's the last thought in the process.
Although I have lived in London, I have never really considered London my home because it was always going to be a stopping-off point for me, and it has been too.
Jazz isn't dead yet. It's the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it's a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it's coming out of the U.S., it's not going to survive unless it's got some jazz influence.
I was born in London in 1919. I first went to America in 1946 for a three-month holiday. Then I came back, worked here for almost a year sold up my home and went back on immigration in 1947.
I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician. Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It's always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded.
I was born in the 1960s. I came up in the 1970s. I know how race relations were. The thing is, I want to advance the ball and never return to those days again. I want to keep the topic going. I'm going to discuss it. And we're going to make America better. It's my job as a citizen, and I demand it.
I love going swimming. I spent a lot of time in North London in summer going to Hampstead Heath and swimming in the ponds there. It's so beautiful; we're so lucky to have that in London.
In 2013, I got a phone call out of the blue from Jason Sudeikis. He said there was an NBC commercial that they wanted him to do, and if we did it, we'd get to go to London for three days. I thought, 'Wow, three days in London. Unbelievable!'
I thought [when I was 16] my days were just going to be spent hanging out on a beach and my girlfriend was going to be Miss Teen USA and my best friend will be a dolphin.
For me, going to London is like coming home. In fact, I've often entertained the idea of ending my days there.
But I think we're going to have people who work from home a couple of days a week, three days a week, four days a week. And I'm perfectly comfortable with all that.
In my work, there is a lot of storytelling. The storytelling is not a new thing. Back in the [Howard] Thurston days, the [Harry] Houdini days, the [Harry] Blackstone days, it was stories, but the stories were, "We're going to the Egyptian temples, and we're going to vanish the Prince of Thebes," and, "On my last trip to the Orient ..."
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