John Cooper Clarke Quotes

When Blur first started and we were playing Manchester the Hacienda was the place to go. That was where a lot of exciting stuff was happening and London was pretty dead.

If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's the Fall.

In the '80s, we played the Roxy and the Whiskey with our bands.

For me, growing up in New York, it started with Elvis Costello and the Clash and then got into louder things like Bad Brains and Stimulators, because those were, like, the local bands. Then I started getting into bands from England like the Slits. I remember seeing Gang of Four at Irving Plaza; that was a really big show for me.

I was in band that played mostly covers for a while, and the bands that we would cover were, like, the alternative rock bands of that day: we did a Jane's Addiction song and a Faith No More song. All the kind of alternative radio of that time, the late '80s, basically.

The early music I heard was Top of the Pops. But in bedrooms, around the house with my brother playing the Sex Pistols, Sham 69 and the Ham and all these groups then going into that sort of mod turnover scene and then going into the New Romantics scene the coming of age myself in the mid-eighties and into the noughties, it was changing.

Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.

I'm not an '80s fan. I'm more '70s New York pre-punk kind of thing, and I guess I grew up with '90s grunge, post-punk pop music.

Devo and The Cramps didn't get big until they went to New York City. Chrissie Hynde didn't get big until she moved to London. When I was growing up, there wasn't even a place to play - just one little bar. If we wanted to have a gig, then we had to drive 45 minutes up to Cleveland.

I'm definitely nostalgic about the music of my youth; The Clash and Fishbone and that whole music scene. I still have all that music to this day. There was some great music going on in the late 70s and 80s.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

We can talk about Manchester! I like coming here, it's a wicked city. It's my second favourite city in England after London. I like Liverpool too but there's a lot more to do in Manchester.

The Butcherettes are led by a female singer, and they're sort of wild.

We didn't gel with Poison and the Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi was the best of the pop metal bands, but we never fit in with the hair metal stuff. We were never as hip as the Chili Peppers. We were in the middle.

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.

When I was 16, I used to hang out at the Nambucca pub in North London and see The Libertines play live.

Our album 'Show No Mercy' came out in late '83, and we did three or four shows in San Francisco after the release. That was our first experience with stage-divers, crowd-surfing, people walking on people across an entire crowd.

It's the faster bands that made me want to play guitar, bands like The Jam.

I love punk, I love a lot of British Invasion bands, I love garage bands.

My first job in NYC was playing a gig in the early nineties at CBGBs.

There's a focus that hasn't been there for ages and ages and some American bands are sounding quite English like they did in the late 70s and early 80s.

I love playing the Fillmore. I love the walk from the hotel and climbing up those old, iron stairs that lead to the stage. I imagine Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors and all those other great bands climbing those same stairs.

Things that excite me are these four different bands: Wire, with a song called 'Champs,' Misfits, with a song called 'Hybrid Moments,' R. Stevie Moore, and Wipers 'Wait A Minute.'

Holy Joy were a cult '80s band led by the wonderful songwriting genius that is Johny Brown.