- It's always a pleasure to hear "Do They Know It's Christmas?" for a couple of reasons. Every time it's played money goes to the fund, and it also brings back memories of the time. More the good ones than the bad. It's a song which still kind of stands up today. It's become a modern hymn.
- I've managed to work with most of my heroes over the years but one of the standouts was collaborating with Kate Bush on the song "Sister and Brother" from my "Answers to Nothing" album. Pure genius.
- [on his influences] Very linear really, starting with Hank Marvin (Hank B. Marvin) and the haunting atmospheres he created on those great Shadows (The Shadows) records. Then I discovered Peter Green, Eric Clapton through the British blues boom, and eventually Mick Ronson and Brian May. I think Mick Ronson was hugely underrated as a guitarist. He could express more in one or two notes than all the 'whizz-kid' guitarists from any era ever could.
- [on Live Aid (1985)] I'd seen Queen a couple of times but I didn't expect this incredibly finely honed performance.
- [on Freddie Mercury] As an aspiring musician who came of age in the Seventies and Eighties, I've always admired Freddie's huge talent and his ability to break new ground, and I'd defy any musician of my generation - and probably since - who's not been influenced by what Freddie did because it was just so radical and different and everything he did was infused with melody.
- [on "Do They Know It's Christmas?"] Phil Collins played drums on the day. I thought that his first take was brilliant but being a perfectionist he asked for another. And that was even better.
- At the height of the 1980s, Band Aid reconnected rock stars with their consciences. It also opened up a floodgate for an entire onslaught of charity records featuring pop stars singing in a chorus of concern. This soon became the industry standard, using celebrity, the very powerful force of celebrity, for good causes.
- [on "Do They Know It's Christmas?"] You know, I'm still not convinced it's a good song. I think both Bob and I have written much, much better things. But it's probably the thing we'll be remembered for most. A kind of musical epitaph in a way.
- On paper, if you look at my career, it just makes me look like a dreadful musical tart. But if you look at it properly, there's a line running all the way through it. There's a reason that all these things kind of happened. Luck has a lot to do with it, but buying a synthesizer in the Rich Kids, which instigated Visage, which led to Ultravox - there's a a path that runs all the way through it, although it just looks like a spider has run across the page with ink on its feet.
- I can't stand people who lie. I find it offensive on a variety of levels. They think you're an idiot and that you don't know they are lying. What they are saying to you is: I don't respect you.
- [on David Bowie] We looked towards what he did, we are all still walking in his slipstream. We are still many, many yards behind what he was doing because he led the way. He was the leader, he was the guv'nor.
- [on David Bowie] Some things were more commercially successful than others, but you do get the overwhelming impression that commercial success was not his driving force, creativity was.
- [on David Bowie] I can't think of anyone else other than The Beatles who has affected so many people with their music and their thoughts and emotions. He infiltrated every genre of music. He changed everything.
- [in 2016] The industry doesn't exist to support that type of band, things that aren't straightforward, chart-topping stuff. Our industry was built on the interesting oddities and those interesting oddities aren't being signed.
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