Chrissie Hynde Quotes

I've always thought of myself as so unsuited to be a frontman.

I don't even know if I exist offstage.

All your travelling is together, you eat together, you're on stage as a band together, when you get to the sound-check the band and the crew are all together.

To portray a singer who gets on stage at night, who is away from the limelight, is never an easy task.

I've worked with a band, and it's nice to have someone to travel around with, but I didn't like it as well on stage.

Now when I say Sophie Ellis-Bextor I feel that's not really me because that's become this entity from doing the gigs and the shows and the make-up contracts and whatever else.

I always tend to think of all of my shows as possibly my last show. I'm like a junior Springsteen, without the underbite.

Being in a rock n' roll band was like being in a Sherman tank. Nothing got to you. You were surrounded and protected by men.

When we first went there we completely lacked confidence. Our manager told us our act was too long, and told us to drop certain numbers and concentrate on the exciting stuff. And he was right.

My act is always a work in progress. I pray I have a bad day before a show.

I never aspired to be in a band, but being onstage is a very cool feeling. It's like you're the lord of the room. It's hard to croon and run around doing big scissor kicks while also trying to play, though. I'm still mastering that.

I think I should get a bigger between-the-song persona, so then I'm not wandering around the stage like some mad old auntie that's saying hello to people and falling over.

Can I be a leading man? I don't believe myself to be; I don't think that I am, but I'm in this place as a performer where I think about how to make things smaller, more subtle.

I'm not very good at being a performing monkey.

A lot of backup singers are really shy and don't want their life documented. They're not pining to be celebrity. They've had a front-row look at celebrity for a long time, and most people find out it's not for them.

It's great to play live. I love it and appreciate it more than I did in the early days. It's a central part of being in A-ha.

Above and beyond anything, we didn't have lives outside of the band.

I was at a slight disadvantage in that I had never played in bands or done any performances before, and that's just as important as writing, recording, and putting records out. It's been a lot of hard work, balanced with a lot of pinch-myself moments of touring in crazy parts of the world.

When we're on tour, we try to keep our voices sharp. We get up there and put on the best show we can.

I just was never into performing. It's just hard work. It's hard work.

I think that it's crucial. I think that playing live, if you want to be an artist - that's what artists do.

It's hard to pinpoint highlights on tour because they're the gigs really. The whole day becomes about the show. From the time you wake up you are slowly building up to that.

We've got the pretty-boy lead singer and the fat, dumpy drummer, and I'm the zany guitarist. Sure, we've played up the image at times. But it's the music that matters most.

I was watching TV, and there was a girl acting a fool. And I was like, 'I could do that.'

When I'm singing my songs on stage, I feel like I'm doing a rock show, even though I don't think all my music is particularly straight up rock.