I was going to be a jazz-fusion guitarist. I came to London at one point with my mate, and we were going to make it. We spent three days there and went back home to our mummies.
I spent two years playing open mic nights in Brighton, and I heard more and more people saying, 'You should give it a go in London.'
Well, I heard of Sunny Ade, and looks as if his music is gonna be big on a global level, because I was in London the other day and some people asked me to review the album.
The Moody Blues were a blues band, so when we got discovered, we were taken to London. That's where we started to make it. That's where the record labels were. That's where the action was.
If I'm playing a gig in London, it feels so important. The adrenaline rush here is bigger than anywhere else. I kind of like the pressure that London puts you under.
I think Katy B encapsulates young London in a way I never could. She reps London harder than anyone song-wise since Lily Allen.
My family had no money or social connections with the music industry but I came to London and had some success that continues to influence my life.
[Paul McCartney] never, at the time, was going back to leaning back on the roots of his old band. He always built upon where he was, which was in London. And he didn't overuse synthesizers. He used them just enough. It's such a cool sound.
London is a dead duck, as far as innovative new music is concerned, unless you want to have your head blown off with some outrageous, rubbish, pounding dance music.
I look back on the early days of Free with Paul Kossoff with the most fondness of any of my bands, because I met him at a time when I was in London and very hungry, and we believed in each other.
The Yardbirds came in to the Crawdaddy Club a week after the Stones finished their Sunday night residency. They had done it for almost a year, I think, and then we did it for a year. It was better when they were playing there because when they went they took half the crowd with them and it took us quite a while to build up our own following.
We're obviously a London band, and British at heart.
Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's foray into some artful excursions into some ethereal electric experiments. There was a lot curious activities emerging in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin back then developing some fiercely fuzzy of synth-like effects way outside the norm which really blew the lid off things.
I guess a certain contingent of the musicians in London at the beginning of the '70s were fed up with denim and the hippies. And I think we kind of wanted to go somewhere else.
I came to London during what was called the second British invasion. The music was from Britain, the fashion was from Britain, everything was from Britain, so I knew I had to be in Britain.
I studied music all the way through college, but as soon as I graduated from university, I got straight into London and got straight into film music. So really my experiences have been being around the orchestras in London and being around the people who work in film music.
I just like the lineage and the heritage and the fact that British dance music is still progressing. I'm from London; I love London, and I wouldn't know how else to show that love in musical terms. There's something about British stuff that's a bit faster, a bit harder-hitting. Just tough.
