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PRESS

"The finest products of the minimalist mentality - Reich's ‘Music for 18 Musicians’,
Riley’s exquisitely impure undertakings, Glenn Branca's tumultuous The Ascension
- rise above the cold consideration of mechanics and draws the listener into the
realms of ecstasy. Cadenza is the track in question, a mesmerising feature for two
pianos that rise and dip like a tea clipper in a high wind. The effect is breath-taking;
it’s superb enough to make me look forward with optimism to future releases.
LYNDEN BARBER 1981 : MELODY MAKER

“The Amusement is The obvious successor to The Art of Noise in this modern
composers forceful dynamic production. A captivating and impressive piece."
DAVE HENDERSON : MUSIC WEEK

"The best things I heard (at the Huddersfield Festival) were a miniature by James
MacMillian and Andrew Poppy's inventively spare and varied Poems and
Toccatas”
NICHOLAS KENYON : OBSERVER

"Noise of industrial labour is submerged in Andrew Poppy's music as tremendous

gathering melange of piano then brass and synthesiser, finally electric guitar in great
slabs of impersonal, repetitive throbbing sound. A scenario of mixed gestures, solo
melancholy and frantic deshabillement.... The Songs of the Clay People
remembered by a child, are lost, fleeting renascent in a grey metropolis of granite
rooms.... where excitement is provided by music which really did strike me as being
of exceptional merit"
MICHAEL COVENEY FINANCIAL TIMES

"A ritual for three performers, offstage voices and musique concrete. The effect is
one of animated hallucination on which Balthus and Francis Bacon might have
collaborated: arrogant ascetic, utterly sincere.
JOHN PETER : SUNDAY TIMES

‘Uranium Miner s’ "impressively full of emotional shrapnel."

PAUL DRIVER : SUNDAY TIMES

"His music is consistently trenchant and telling".

MEIRION BOWEN : GUARDIAN

"The ideal composer to turn Tennessee Williams screen play Baby Doll into an
opera would be an American Janacek and Andrew Poppy comes near to it in the best
moments: strong on atmosphere (a lot of sultry Southern blue notes) and punchily
abbreviated in its story-telling."
MICHAEL JOHN WHITE : THE INDEPENDENT
"A gift for creating atmosphere the scores virtue lies in the deceptively languid way it
can build up an insidious tension."
MARTIN HOYLE : THE TIMES
" A gripping and unusual evening....not a moment of it is dull and several sequences
are startling.
GERALD KAUFMAN : THE SUNDAY EXPRESS
" Poppy was never solely concerned with pure minimalism and he has now
developed a style of enviable flexibility, fusing a range of so called 'serious' and
'popular' sources and allowing each to emerge as appropriate.
KEITH POTTER: THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
“Fulfilling all the Liverpool Philharmonics requirements of new music, Andrew
Poppy’s Horn Horn was consistently entertaining as a study in the comparability
of two alto saxophonist. Harnessed together much of the time , John Harle and
Simon Haram were each allowed the occasional opportunity to emerge on a
comparatively thoughtful solo line from their joint virtuoso endeavours. They
usefully offset the heavy industrial activity in the orchestra which, between the
deceptive opening and closing bars characterises the score as a whole. An
admirably high-energy all-or-nothing performance
GERALD LARNER: THE TIMES
Time At Rest Devouring Its Secret “is a 35 minute single movement work of
"basically one texture" inspired by Riley's ‘In C’, Reich's ‘Drummin’g and
Feldman's ‘For Samuel Beckett’ The light and lean grandeur of the orchestration
recalls Takemitsu: an unpredictable drip-drop pizzicato of deep double bass and
high pitched violin or harp, mingling with tintinnabulous percussives. Overheard,
clouds of strings and electronics drift and repeat in a kind of bittersweet,
melancholy ecstasy that plays some fascinating psychoacoustic games with
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time/space and stasis/movement. Bewitching, beautifully crafted and highly
addictive.”
CHRIS BLACKFORD THE WIRE
Poppy first hit the scene as a composer of fierce electronic soundtracks for
Impact, the seminal 80's theatre company. Later, a stint as the first classical act
signed to Trevor Horn's ZTT label won him an underground pop audience. He
never gained the exposure of a Nyman or a Reich, though, which is a pity,
because this is a first rank composer, bursting with ideas. TARDIS is a large scale
piece, in which an endlessly growing melody is toyed with, split into multiples,
played against itself in a random canon, and hung in the air to spin gently like a
child's mobile. Time and space are suspended, as chiming, plunking and silk-
smooth harmonies seem to progress forever upwards. The Doctor himself could
be proud of this post post-modern, ambient, slightly kitsch, minimal machine
music.
RICHARD WOLFSON THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Avalanche Thoughts suggest Andrew Poppy and Julia Bardsley, are those
dangerous cognitive moments that beckon disaster. Before the audience enters the
performance space, we are met with an exhibition of exquisite objects combining
the motifs of books and shoes enveloped in an understated sound installation. The
video full of blues and whites, is deeply elemental, suggestive of gently blinding
snow or a threat of drowning. The accompanying soundtrack is similarly
beautiful. Shifting like the tide, the piece finally opens up to piano music by turns
melodic and discordant, becoming entwined with secular incantations, intonations
of passion and of danger. In spite of the "thoughts" of its title, this is essentially a
sensory experience. But none the less a beautiful one.
FIONA SHEPARD MARK BROWN THE SCOTSMAN
. “arriving at a distinctive and melodic approach he demonstrates an uncanny
talent for spreading short melodic motifs over long distances without causing the
mind to wander, using subtle development and barely detectable changes in
orchestration. Several composers have adopted his approach since, among them
Michael Torke and Michael Gordon, but it's doubtful any of them have made a
recording quite like the seminal Cadenza an almost transcendental piece of
music. What will surprise is the year of genesis of these pieces. Poppy joined the
ZTT label some twenty years ago, hence this commemorative collection On Zang
Tuub Tumb. The other parallel to draw with Poppy is Cabaret Voltaire, for some

of the music takes on an experimental form, fractured rhythms thrown around for
dissection. Nowhere is this more evident than Kink King Adagio…. an intriguing
listen.
BEN HOOGWOOD MUSIC OMH
Despite his reputation as a minimalist, Andrew Poppy gives you plenty of bang
for your buck on his ZTT works. If you're into contemporary composition, the
bargain of the week has to be Andrew Poppy on Zang Tuum Tumb (ZTT 3CD,
£15.99), which collects Poppy's 1980s albums The Beating of Wings and
Alphabed together with a third, unreleased album and various odds and ends.
You get plenty of notes for your money, too: despite Poppy's reputation as a
minimalist, his best pieces are gloriously abundant in cascading cycles of notes
and noises, with satisfying, circular chord sequences, using very big ensembles
and big-sounding virtual ensembles with keyboards and samplers. Poppy studied
music at Goldsmith's, where he co-founded Regular Music. Later, he was a key
member of the Lost Jockey. By signing to Trevor Horn's ZTT label, Poppy made
some interesting lateral moves. For one thing, it meant that his music was
beautifully recorded, using the state- of-the-art studios. It also promoted Poppy's
oeuvre to a style-conscious, Face-reading audience, complete with detailed art
direction, enigmatic notes and Anton Corbijn portraits. This re-alignment cut both
ways, and may have distanced Poppy from the serious recognition now handed
out to his less clued-up contemporaries. Yet what you hear in Poppy's music,
particularly in key works such as 32 Frames for Orchestra and Cadenza for
Piano and Electric Piano, is a keen ear for the large-scale, compositional use of
timbre - the qualities that drew him to the cutting edge technology of ZTT's
studio-based culture. It's even there in his theme tune for The Tube, which always
sounded huge compared to electro-TV music. What Poppy brought to ZTT - a
label that didn't need much prompting to take itself seriously - was some
genuinely good and serious work. His music's purpose is often revealed more
effectively through the multi-tracked recording process. Younger composers may
take this for granted, working out their masterpieces on PCs, but Poppy got there
first
JOHN L WALTERS JULY 05 GUARDIAN
Composer Andrew Poppy is good with large forces, and with small, intense
ensembles such as piano solos and duos… Wave Machine renew the "tough
minimalism" of Poppy's ZTT heyday. The radio-friendly track is Balcony
Scene/Doppelgänger, which makes ingenious use of a Schubert sample from
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Fischer-Dieskau and Brendel. But Poppy is wasted on electro. Give this man a big
orchestral commission, now!
JOHN L WALTERS DEC 08 THE GUARDIAN
Echo & Decay, Spit & Crackle Recent Listening April 2009 "...and the shuffle of
things" Andrew Poppy's new CD starts with a spit and crackle of velocity that
slowly moves toward a triumphant, almost pomp-like, classical-sounding burst of
sound. This is immediately hijacked by a voice which self-consciously
undermines all our expectations by talking about the music it is interrupting.
Except of course, it isn't, because the spoken part is intrinsic to the score. Just
when we come to terms with that idea a bell-like note rings and the music fades
away as the voice continues its existential pondering. It's a fantastic introduction
to this 'cabinet of sonic curioisities' (as the sleeve notes puts it) and these kinds of
musical and verbal conundrums and subversions continue throughout another 9
tracks. Much as I like a lot of Poppy's music, for me, it's a return to the kind of
work I most like of his, which has previously appeared on his ZTT LP Alphabed
and to a lesser extent the more difficult Ophelia Ophelia. Poppy is a master of
hybridization: classical and contemporary classical music, orchestrated rock,
chamber music, synthesizer rock, art rock, show music, avant-garde music and
post-rock along with performance poetry and declamatory oration are all present
in the mix here. But why attach labels to what is in essence new and inspirational
music? Whether or not this CD is merely things shuffled, a kind of musical sleight
of hand, or not, is irrelevant. Poppy has made all these things anew, and I
recommend the CD to anyone interested in where music might be found in the
21st Century and remain approachable, varied, dynamic and entertaining.
RUPERT LOYDELL 09 STRIDE MAGAZINE

Mention Andrew Poppy, and people will most likely recall a couple of
relatively high profile albums released on ZTT in the mid 1980’s, charting
the British face of what was once called ‘Systems music’. In fact, Poppy’s
work has continued to develop in many and varied directions since then.
Laurence Crane fills in the blanks.
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Over the last two decades Andrew Poppy has steadily assembled a fascinating and
unusual body of work which encompasses concert music, opera and scores for
contemporary dance, theatre, film and television. Despite a certain amount of
commercial success in the 1980’s Poppy’s work remains largely neglected by
musical organisations in this country. At a time when many younger composers
seem to achieve recognition by producing music which is safe and superficial this
neglect of a genuine original is, to say the least, slightly scandalous.
Andrew Poppy is undoubtedly an original composer but paradoxically it’s
extremely difficult to pinpoint that originality in terms of a definition of his
musical style. This is principally because defining musical characteristics differ
from work to work; each piece deliberately inhabits its own self-contained world,
setting out with determination to explore strictly defined musical parameters and
also non-musical and conceptual preoccupations. Poppy expertly fuses tonal and
non-tonal harmonic worlds in such a way that the listener actually forgets about
the polarity between them. Despite this diversity it’s clear that one composer is at
work; one with a keen sense of structure and proportion.
This diversity is well illustrated by pieces on two of the five CD’s that Poppy has
recorded. ‘The Beating of Wings’ was one of two CD’s released on the pop label
ZTT during the mid 1980’s when pop musicians had become interested in what
classical composers of a minimalist persuasion were doing; Poppy had excellent
credentials in this respect as a founder member of the systems music big band The
Lost Jockey. The four pieces on The Beating of Wings show an assured handling
of facets of a post-minimal world, from 32 Frames for Orchestra, a majestic
chaconne based on a simple progression of four chords, to Listening In , an
hypnotic and muscular piece created in the recording studio. By further contrast
Poems and Toccatas on his CD Recordings (released on the composers’ own
Bitter and Twisted label in 1992) is a sequence of short pieces for violin and
piano. The harmonic language is more angular and taut and the pieces are
beautifully crafted.
More recent work, so far unrecorded , includes Horn Horn , a double saxophone
concerto in six movements, written in 1996 for John Harle and Simon Haram and
the extraordinary Revolution no. 8: Airport for Joseph Beuys for orchestra, a
desolate soundscape utilising tape delay which, for this writer at least, is possibly
Andrew Poppy’s finest achievement to date.
LAURENCE CRANE 1999 SOUNDINGS
 | ANDREW POPPY

ONE OF THE UK’S LEADING CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS, ANDREW POPPY ARRIVED AT

ZTT IN 1984 HAVING STUDIED UNDER JOHN CAGE AND FOUNDED THE AVANT-GARDE
COLLECTIVE THE LOST JOCKEY. HE WENT ON TO SUCCESSFULLY STRADDLE TWO
WORLDS: ORCHESTRAL COMPOSITIONS ON THE ONE HAND AND LEFTFIELD POP
COLLABORATIONS ON THE OTHER. AN INTERESTING MIX WE THOUGHT HERE AT QSHEET,
SO WE DECIDED TO CATCH UP WITH THE BUSY COMPOSER TO FIND OUT ABOUT HIS LATEST
CD, ‘ANDREW POPPY ON ZANG TUUM TUMB’, AND LIFE IN A CLASSICAL WORLD…

QS: How would you, categorise your music?
You’ve been labelled an ‘experimental artist’,
your music is classical but not quite classical.
AP: Yeah, well, it is hard isn’t it, because
obviously I get asked this question, “What is it
you do?” because it doesn’t seem like straight
classical music and although there are vocals
there’s never really a proper song there, and
some of the pieces are very long, and yet
sometimes there’s an orchestra and sometimes
there’s a drum kit. It is a representation of all the
things that I’ve been influenced by and the
history of my life in some ways. I wasn’t brought
up with a lot of classical music, but the things I’d
heard I was really interested in as well, so I
suppose all my life it’s been going between the
two things – listening to classical music, listening
to pop music – and the two have kind of come out
in what I do. I left school quite early and I was
playing in a band. We were playing in clubs and
things, and very early I got bored with that and
then I decided there’s something other than pop
music; being in a band can be really frustrating
and stressful because there are these four egos.
I didn’t like the conflict there was in the band and
I decided I wanted to learn the piano properly. I
went back to having private piano lessons, but
then I thought, well, I need to study, so I went
university. Then, when you’re at university you get
educated – or indoctrinated, depending on how
you look at it – into a whole other area of music,
a whole other area of music that’s actually not
very well known. Contemporary classical music
has a very, very small audience and while that
music’s very interesting it’s very, very frustrating
that it hasn’t got an audience, and I’m not
interested in that thing of playing to two people.
I’m always interested in the energy and the
excitement of pop music, so I’ve somehow tried
to find a way to bring the two worlds together, on
my own terms – I’m not trying to change the
world or anything.
QS: Do you think it was advantageous in the
long term to get an appreciation of music from
a young age, learning while you’re young
when it’s a bit more natural maybe?
AP: I do think being able to have an appreciation
of lots of different types of music is useful. I’m
quite glad that my parents said, “Well we want
to give you something” in fact, because I’m one
of four kids and it was a principle of my parents’
that “You will have piano lessons. If you don’t
like it after six months you can give it up, but
we’re going to let you have piano lessons
because that’s something we think we should
good, it did get me some of the basic things. I
look back and I think that’s quite a good thing
for me because I have two ways of doing things
– one is quite a taught way, which is like the
piano and is proper, I know what the notes are
and everything, and the way that I learned the
guitar was very intuitive. In some ways I still
work like that in that if I play the guitar I tend to
be more physical with it, whereas if I play the
piano I tend to work with notation and I read the
dots. I think learning notation is a really useful
tool. It’s not the only thing by any means
because some people can just play and they
can’t really feel anything or they can’t do
anything intuitively, they can’t do anything
spontaneously, but what’s fantastic is if you can
pick up a piece of music that was written in the
seventeenth century, and you can look at it and
you can find out about it, you can play it to
yourself. I still find great pleasure in that. I’m
not a very good sight-reader. I can’t just sit
down and it’s instantly perfect, but I can play
through something looking at the dots, and I
can get something out of the library and I can
play it, and it’s like people read a novel – you
can read a 19th-century novel or 18th-century
novel, you get a window on to a particular world
– and so through notation and having a skill at

Compose
and did an A-level and then eventually I went to give you”, and actually even though I wasn’t very the keyboard it allows you to have that. >

016 | QSheet magazine | November 2005

YOURSELF November 2005 | QSheet magazine | 017
 | ANDREW POPPY
QS: We ask a lot of people who have been
around in the music industry for, say, 30, 40
years whether they have noticed a difference
during that time period because of the changes
in pop culture, but if you look at something from
the 17th or 19th century, or whenever, is there
a vast variation in styles of classical music,
going through the different time periods?
AP: There’s more difference between very
experimental music in the last 50 to 60 years
and popular music. Popular music and jazz are
more connected to 19th- and 18th-century
music than they are to contemporary classical
music, which is very, very abstract. I think
there’re lots of connections between music of
all areas. I think that’s the fascinating thing and
that’s to do with the time we’re living in, which is
where recording technology has become so
sophisticated, it’s dominated everybody’s lives
since the 1960s. So everything that happens
culturally is recorded and there’s an obsession
with recording, so if you go down to HMV or
whatever you can go and buy Gregorian chant
through to the latest contemporary composition,
but you can also go and buy Indonesian music or
music from Pakistan or wherever. We’re living in
a time when that seems really natural but,
actually, it’s very, very recent. When I was a
student in the 1970s you’d go to the library and
there are one or two anthropological recordings
of non-western music, done for anthropological
reasons, maybe African drumming or something
like that, but apart from that you didn’t really
have much awareness of what was happening
outside your own little circle.
QS: Who are your influences, and have they
split you in two to a point, because you have
rock and pop influences as well as classical?
AP: From the turn of the last century, there’re
two composers: Stravinsky and Debussy. They
are big figures really; I listened to a lot of
Stravinsky when I was a student and I played
Debussy on the piano, because he wrote a lot of
piano music, because he was a fantastic pianist,
and then, more recently, people like Philip Glass
and Steve Reich and Terry Riley, the Americans.
They were classically trained people but again
they wanted to do something that wasn’t to do
with that world. They wanted to have something
that had a different energy, and a lot of that is to
do with the way the pulse works, the way the
rhythm works. If you hear non-western musics
they’re usually very rhythmic and that’s
important. That’s why jazz and pop are so
successful because rhythm really connects with
people because it’s so physical. Composers like
Glass and Reich and Riley, they want to bring
that back into the music. That’s what we’ve done
in terms of pioneering the work that you use. It’s
what maybe myself and a few other composers
are trying to do: trying to make a sort of art
music that’s got the energy and the rhythmic
excitement of pop music and some jazz.
18 | QSheet magazine | November 2005
QS: The album now is looking back at work
from 20 years ago. Why now and why the third
CD with the unreleased material?
AP: Why now? Well it hasn’t been available for
about ten years. ZTT is a small label that has
always been licensed to a major. I think when
ZTT and Universal hooked up, which was
probably about ten years ago, they only decided
to re-release Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which
was obviously the most successful act on the
label, and everything else was unreleased or
they didn’t re-release. So my recordings from the
1980s on ZTT haven’t been available for ten
years. A year or so ago the Universal deal
finished, so that freed ZTT to look at its back
catalogue again, and then I said to them, “Well
obviously I hope that you would like to re-release
it, and if you do re-release it I’ll be totally behind
it because obviously I stand by those records. It
was a great time for me.” Initially it was going to
be a two-CD package, and then they said, “Well
there’s enough for three, why don’t we keep it
neat?”, because the original album was called
‘The Beating Of Wings’, the second one was
called ‘Alphabet’ and I’d actually already titled
my third album ‘Under The Sun’, so on this box it
basically keeps those titles and that
arrangement, even though what you have is
extra tracks as well for each of the first two
albums. You have the 12” and the 7”.
QS: And what about more recent work that
you’ve been doing? Again there’s such a
variety: writing scores for various people,
whether for TV, film, individuals, orchestras …
AP: Well I try to keep busy. A project that came
out at the beginning of the year was a recording
of songs I’d made with Claudia Brucken. She
was the lead singer with Propaganda, who were
on the ZTT label. We knew each other back then
and I was going to work on a track of hers, but
that never happened, but we met up again about
five years ago and we started chatting, became
friends. We started talking about maybe doing
something together but something really simple
without any real pressure of, well, it’s got to be a
hit. So it’s an album of different songs that we
like. I’ve made some arrangements either for
piano and voice or guitar and voice, so it’s really
simple. That’s all there is – either piano, on
some there’s two electric piano tracks and voice
or guitar, and there’s an electric guitar – but
that’s all it is, just one instrument and a voice,
and we released that at the beginning of the
year and it seems to be going very well.
QS: It’s got ‘Wooden Heart’ on it and, reading
your biography, it says that you used to listen
to Elvis on your transistor, so in effect you’ve
come full circle – from young child listening to
Elvis coming back to doing a revised version
of ‘Wooden Heart’ …
AP: Well, yes, it’s interesting because somebody
asked me a long time ago, “What’s the first song
you can remember?” It’s an interesting question,
and thinking back it is probably ‘Wooden Heart’
on the radio because it’s a classic track that I
associate with that, probably early 1960s or
maybe late 1950s, I can’t remember.
QS: What future plans have you got lined up?
AP: Well there’re lots of things. I’m making a
piece for the Estonian National Male Voice
Choir, which is going to be premiered in Tallinn
in February next year. I’m just working on that
at the moment. That’s 52 male voices plus
some electronics and some percussion.
QS: Do you think that this market segment –
it’s a very broad term, I know – needs to have
somebody like a young figurehead to try and
bring the audiences in, because you’ve got
Joss Stone, Katie Melua, Jamie Cullum and
now Michael Bublé who are bringing all the
new jazz audiences in and yet there’s been no
one for a while who’s doing anything
classical-associated. You had Vanessa Mae
and Nigel Kennedy a while ago …
AP: Well, you see the thing is, it’s an
interesting question. I think you’re right but
actually there are those young people like
Vanessa Mae, but they’re performers. This is
one of the contradictions in a way, although I
do play I’m primarily presenting myself as a
composer, which is a different idea. It’s about
being primarily a writer although I do get out
there and I play on all my records and I control
my records, I produce my records, so if you
look at Nigel Kennedy he’s a player really and
he made his reputation on the back of doing
Vivaldi, and Vanessa Mae, she’s a very good
player but she plays, she probably does write
things, I don’t know. I’ve heard some of the
things she’s done but they’re all arrangements
of pieces. It’s a tricky one really.
QS: If everything is cyclical musically does it
just need something to make people aware, to
get these things in the public ear?
AP: It’s probably a big discussion. For instance
we’ve got, Claudia and I, this record we
released beginning of the year – OK it’s a very
small release and it’s been ticking over because
we’ve both got our fan base, which is very loyal.
Then my partner, who’s a film maker, video
maker, made a video for us for one of the
tracks because we were going to do a little
special, one-off version of one of the tracks.
Then Mute Records saw it and immediately they
saw it they said, “We want to release this as a
single” and, to me, it’s a classic case of if you
have that kind of visual representation you’ve
instantly got access to all those TV programmes
and you have access to a market. Trying to pick
up what you’re getting at – is it to do with the
fact that music is not enough on its own? It has
to have some visual representation, or are you
saying it’s all about sex?
QS: No, not necessarily – it’s what makes
people first aware of something they’re not
familiar with. To do something with TV or film
is just perfect because it can either be nice in
the background, supporting whatever’s
shown, or as a stand-alone piece. Again you’ve
done a number of things for TV haven’t you?
AP: Yeah, well, there was a period of time when
I did quite a lot of title themes for different
programmes. So yeah, I know what that’s
about, the 30 seconds or a minute, or a minute
and a half, whatever. The first one I did was for
‘The Tube’, the last edition of ‘The Tube’, which
I did when I was at ZTT and that was great fun.
“I’VE BEEN MAKING STUFF
FOR 25 YEARS NOW, AND
THE THING IS, THERE ARE
UPS AND DOWNS. YOU GO
THROUGH LOW PERIODS OF
THINKING “SHOULD I BE
DOING THIS AT ALL?” I
THINK EVERYBODY HAS
THAT, HOWEVER BIG OR
UNSUCCESSFUL YOU ARE”
QS: What advice would you give to anybody
who wants to start as a composer or musician?
AP: I think the one thing you need over and above
everything else as an artist is tenacity. It has to
be on a level. You meet some people really young
that have a kind of arrogance and in some
senses that’s great, because you have to be
confident, but you can go through life and be
really horrible to a lot of people being like that;
the thing is, you do need to manage your doubts
somehow. The doubt process is quite important
because if you don’t doubt I think you’ve got no
reflection on your work, so you do meet these
people who think they’re absolutely great and we
all know they’re not. So you have your own doubt,
which modifies what you do and I think that’s a
good thing. I’ve been making stuff for 25 years
now, and the thing is, there are ups and downs.
You go through low periods of thinking “Am I
doing the right thing?” or “Should I be doing this
at all?” I think everybody has that, however big or
unsuccessful you are. You just have to keep going
because I think that’s the important thing, and
then somebody will turn round and say, “Yeah,
that piece that was really great. It was so good
that piece. I was so glad”, and that makes the
day. It was something that you did at a particular
time and somebody’s got something, and that’s
what being an artist is about – it’s about creating
a musical experience for somebody.
November 2005 | QSheet magazine | 19