When I first started playing, I definitely had a younger scum-punk crowd, but as my music developed more and after I started playing electric guitar - you'd think it would be opposite - but a lot of people were like, "You've changed." And I have more of an older audience now.
... so much of what we do now started in 1954 at Sun Records in Memphis Tennessee ... those guys were inventing that stuff (Rock & Roll) ... you can really tell on some tracks ... they were actually afraid at times of what they were playing. But Rock & Roll definitely didn't come before that time; it started right there
We were playing, not for the drunks, but for the musicians, because it was more intellectually challenging. We needed somewhere to put our energy to show that we were growing, and as we started to achieve this, people came to hear us musically.
Growing up I was a total movie-holic, but I always wanted to play the role that Clark Gable was playing or Spencer Tracy was playing. I was really never interested in the parts that women were playing. I found the parts that guys were playing were so much more interesting.
When we first started playing shows, we were all 17. Everybody started somewhere. There were guys throwing shows in condemned houses and backyards just for the love of music and for the love of what bands were standing for.
After the first three or four years of me taking rap seriously, it started to look more promising. I started booking shows and more people were playing my music, so I starting believing this could actually work for me.
When I was playing with synth players, I was still within a conceptual framework of playing music. When I started playing solo, I became much more aware of the acoustic phenomena that the instruments were producing.
When I started on the London circuit in 1989, nationwide there were about 150 to 200 people that were what you could call alternative comedians - that weren't club comics. Now, last year when the Laughing Horse chain of clubs held a new acts competition, a thousand people entered. So, there are 800 people more.
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
I was on Facebook. I was on MySpace. And somebody said to me, You should check out this thing called Twitter. I knew five people that were on it, so I started following those people and seeing what they were doing, and then I applied my own sensibility to it. The more that I shared, the more people started following me.
Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn't change them. most of the time, they couldn't change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.
I remember in the days when we started, when we first went on the road, we went to Berkeley and played with Exodus. We couldn't believe another band was playing the same kind of music we were playing because there was only a handful of bands that were doing it.
When we were first started we were doing a lot of Motown stuff, but actually playing it more in a rock way. Everybody in the band sang and we did a lot of harmonies.
The Beatles realized that what they were making in the studio could never be performed. And they had already given up on performing because there were too many screaming fans and they were playing in larger and larger venues so they couldn't even hear what they were playing, it just wasn't any fun any more.
Once I started getting mainstream people to my shows, I realized we were taking too many solos, and they were too long. I started gauging when people were going on their iPhones.
I got real bored in '96. Wasn't nobody to fight. Nothing to look forward to. That's when I started playing basketball again. Had I not started playing basketball, my boxing career would have failed. But I went from a sport where nobody could touch me to another where I couldn't touch nobody.