Some of my music interviews that you may have forgotten (Pt. 1)
Sorry I’ve been so quiet as of late, but I can assure you that there will be breaking news in the very near future that will explain my silence. In the meantime, however, I wanted to share some links to past music interviews I’ve done over the course of my career—these are all from the Bullz-Eye years—and to offer the minor tease that there will be a lot more forthcoming.
"When I was with the Rich Kids, there were loads of bands that came after us. We saw Duran Duran in the front row when we was in Birmingham, checking us out. I think we were the bridgehead between punk and what came after it. That’s our claim to fame: that we got Duran Duran going!" - Glen Matlock
"[Lennon: NYC] was very, very emotional for me. And I just never thought it was going to be that emotional, because I thought, 'Okay, thirty years…' I’ve been doing John’s songs and dealing with it on a business level for thirty years, so it’s nothing, right? But it wasn’t." - Yoko Ono
"We started [Hootie and the Blowfish] to get drunk and meet girls, you know? We got lucky, we had some success, and we decided that we were going to be good guys, do the right thing, and help people when we can. For our state to be recognizing us [with a monument] 25 years after we started this thing, it’s pretty amazing...and it’s pretty damned cool." - Darius Rucker
"Pink Floyd offered me a job after Dark Side of the Moon. They said, 'Come and work for us full-time, do our live show, be our engineer.' And just at that time, I was starting to get involved in my own production, and Pilot’s 'Magic' came out. It was a difficult decision to make, and, obviously, I made the right decision, but it’s sad that we only made one album together. We worked very well together." - Alan Parsons
"We had a lot of miles together under our belt as a band again, and we’d played a lot of gigs. The intuition and instinct was back and was there, we’d spent a good amount of time working the songs out from scratch all together, road tested them, so, yeah, I just think there’s a more cohesive nature to [Crowded House’s Intriguer]. This feels more like a band record. It feels like everyone’s got a bigger part and the character of the band is more on show." - Neil Finn
"I got all kinds of the oddest mail from (Sons of Anarchy). People would write me in my character. Like, girls. Angry girls, because I had hit Charlie. 'Look here, Mr. Weston, I don’t know you who think you are…' Uh, I think my name is Henry, and I think I drive a Subaru back to my house after the day of work is over in the Valley where we shoot this, you weirdo." - Henry Rollins
"If you’ve ever seen (The Chase), all of my lines, I made ‘em up. I just reeled everything off in all those scenes. Like, 'I’m a standard issue street soldier!' That’s what got me the part. I said that in the audition. (Director Adam Rifkin) goes, 'What are you?' I’m, like, 'I’m a standard issue street soldier!' I just pulled that out of my ass. And Fox said, 'Who wrote that?' He’s, like, 'He came up with that!' They said, 'Give him the part.' And to this day, people will say, 'Hey, could you sign this, ‘To a standard issue street soldier’?'" - Henry Rollins
"It’s such an effort to make an album where you feel happy with all the songs and all the tracks. And I’m doing loads of touring at the moment, and, you know, that takes a lot of time and energy doing all that. So making an album actually gets harder. But for me, it’s really important to keep making new songs, to keep doing it. Otherwise, you just stop dead as an artist." - Howard Jones
"[After ‘Cuts You Up’] I was suddenly being recognized in malls and stuff when I walked around during the day, and I was, like, 'Oh, no!' I was being interviewed by 'Entertainment Tonight' and all sorts of things, and I thought, 'Oh, God, I am what I am, and I know what I am, but…I may need to take a raincheck, because I’m not sure I know how to talk to these people. They’re aliens from some other planet!'" - Peter Murphy
"'Sara Smile,' which was on the silver album (Hall and Oates), was the third single released, and that broke in the R&B community. That broke on black radio. So our first success was on black radio, which was sort of natural, given our background. And then we crossed over onto pop radio. So that’s really how we came in: very much through the back door." - Daryl Hall
“We had an amazing run between the ‘70s and the ‘80s, but we never set out and said, ‘Oh, we’re going to write ten number-one records.’ I mean, you always hope that your songs will connect on that level, but as songwriters, we were more concerned with the quality of our material in general. If one of those songs rose to the top or stuck out as a single, it was really more up to the record company and marketing to make that happen.” - John Oates
Wow, that is quite a spread!