David Toop Quotes

I'd entirely forgotten about Pass The Distance, and then I went to Japan in 2000, and was asked to do interviews with all these journalists, who were showing up with bootlegs of this record, asking me to talk about it. I was astonished. It kind of gained momentum.

Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art.

Like a fly bouncing uselessly off a closed window, I'm caught at a moment when the effort of finding new ways to perceive the world feels just out of reach for me.

At that time, 73 and 74, I became aware that there were a number of us making instruments. Max Eastley was a good friend and he was making instruments, Paul Burwell and I were making instruments, Evan Parker was making instruments, and we knew Hugh Davies, who was a real pioneer of these amplified instruments.

Dub music is like a long echo delay, looping through time ... turning the rational musical order into an ocean of sensation.

I'd been listening to African-American music since the first record I ever bought, which was by Sam Cooke. And it sounds more like my private thoughts that I never thought I would be able to articulate - I never thought I would be able to express publicly.

People don't have to put you in a box. You can have the confidence to move across, and combine and learn from each different practice. They inform each other.

We drank quite a lot and Tony Harrington said, "We're thinking of starting a record label at The Wire; how about you do a solo record?" I said, "Well, how am I going to do that?" I thought about it, and I'd been working on a lot of music in the years before, and I was working as a journalist, full time, really, up until that point; in whatever little spare time I had, I was working on music. So I said yes.

If I'd thought, "I can't really play this instrument," I wouldn't have done it! But I didn't care, you know. I didn't care!

I was associated with the Artist Placement Group in the early 1970s and David Hall, the video artist, was an Artist Placement Group artist. I was completely broke at that time, and he said to me, "Come and do some teaching" - he was head of department at Maidstone College of Art. And I went and did a couple of teaching days and practically the only person who showed up was David Cunningham [Flying Lizard's main man], with all of this finished work

Paul [ Burwell] and I had also got interested in making books. We'd been working with Bob Cobbing, the sound poet, since the beginning of the 70s, and Bob had this press called Writers Forum.

There's a sense of trajectories that are extraordinary about a life like this. You can reconnect with people and go back to playing with them after years and years of not even knowing if they're alive.

I was working in, being a single parent with a grieving child of five years old. It was horrendous. I couldn't go out much, because I had my daughter to look after. So people used to come round, and Tony Harrington from The Wire came round.

I had ideas about music and sound and listening and time and so on that I wanted to pursue as an individual, and by doing that book, Brian [Eno] opened the door, and he decided to do a record based loosely on the book.

I needed a huge amount of energy to cope with my life. I had a huge amount of energy where stuff was concerned: it was as if all this unconscious material had been unleashed.

If you run out of new ideas when you are very young, then it's a problem of talent; If you run out of new ideas when you get older, it may be that there's nothing left to say, or it may be that core ideas demand repeated attention ...

One of the things about grief - I wouldn't generalise, because everybody responds to tragedies in different ways - but I had a huge amount of energy.

I do still have dips of confidence or [can think] everything I do is rubbish.

We [with David Cunningham] did do Top Of The Pops. It was an eye-opener. I mean, one of the things that was so interesting - I've talked about this a few times recently, and people can't believe it - they used to do this thing called tape switch with the Musicians Union.

One of the nicest things is that I still get, very ambiguously, people saying to me, "Oh, I'm just reading your book." And I say, "Which one, for God's sake, I've done six now!" "Oceans of Sound".

I think I sent one [book] to Brian Eno. I don't know how I got to know his address, but I sent one to him. He called me up and he said, "I really like the book, and I'm starting a new label, would you liked to do something?" It was a tricky situation for me, because I've always had this thing in my life of a tension between collaboration, which was extremely important to me, and then being alone. Make of that what you will!

I remember I did quite a lot of interviews when the book and the CD came out, and I did a drivetime interview for Radio London or something. You wouldn't immediately associate the music on Ocean Of Sound with drivetime radio, but people found things that they liked, and the DJ was playing some records at 5 o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday.The man who was playing them said to me, "That Peter Brotzmann track, it's like having your head boiled in acid."

I guess we all had that work ethic. None of us were rock stars, so if you had time in a studio, it was a big, big deal: you're not going to sit around taking drugs and drinking and waste it, you'll do something.

Logically there is nothing new to say about the New. Or maybe it's just a problem of articulating unfamiliar perceptions.