Dylan Jones > Quotes

“The filming was interrupted at one point by an old man walking his dog, looking for driftwood. Mallet asked him if he wouldn’t mind moving, and pointed out Bowie sitting outside the catering van. ‘Do you know who this is?’ he asked. Sharp as a tack, the old man responded with, ‘Of course I do. It’s some cunt in a clown suit.’ Sometime later, Bowie remembered, ‘That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realise, “Yes, I’m just a cunt in a clown suit.”
― Dylan Jones, David Bowie: A Life

“David could become an expert on something very quickly and then turn round and dismiss it a couple of weeks later.”
― Dylan Jones, David Bowie: The Oral History

“When you feel that you are privy to secret information it always becomes so much more personalized.”
― Dylan Jones, David Bowie: The Oral History

“The eighties weren’t just about androgyny, and in a sense they embraced polymorphous perversity in a way it had never been embraced before, an exploration of self that hadn’t been as intense since the sixties. This was a new type of bohemianism, one empowered by a certainty and an optimism that was only fleeting back in the so-called Swinging Sixties.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Bono (singer, musician, activist): People were very good to me. I was walking with [my wife] Ali, and Freddie Mercury pulled me aside and said, ‘Oh, Bo-No … Is it Bo-No or Bon-O?’ I told him, ‘It’s Bon-O.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Deborah Harry: Giorgio was great. He’s a funny personality. In a way, he’s a scientist. A bit like Leonardo da Vinci, he’s this multilayered artist, a scientist, a curious person. He’s kind of a mathematician, and we were all sort of in awe of him.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Dave Stewart: In 1982, Annie and I went to Australia with the Tourists, but the band broke up and we ended up in a hotel in Wagga Wagga. I had a little black and yellow Wasp synthesizer and was making didgeridoo sounds. When Annie started singing along, we thought, ‘Maybe we could make weird and experimental electronic music?’ On the flight home, we split up as a couple but kept on with the music, carting the gear in a second-hand horsebox.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Neil Tennant: Live Aid was the last thing I was asked to do for Smash Hits. Mark [Ellen] asked me to cover it, and for some completely childish reason I just sort of couldn’t be bothered and said no. So I watched Live Aid sitting in my studio flat on the King’s Road with Jon Savage and [photographer] Eric Watson, all three of us slagging it off.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Prepare your opening and closing remarks and keep them clear and positive.”
― Dylan Jones, Mr Jones' Rules for the Modern Man

“Marc Almond: David came along with this thing called a synthesizer, which at that time we only really knew from the likes of Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, who had huge banks of them. Eno had used one in Roxy Music, and I remember them on The Old Grey Whistle Test playing a ten-minute version of ‘Ladytron’, one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on television.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“The PMRC pressured the music industry to establish a rating system that would warn potential record buyers of sexually explicit and violent lyrics. Their purchases may as well have carried stickers emblazoned with ‘THIS RECORD CONTAINS SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK’N’ROLL!”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Gary Kemp: ‘True’ was written about Clare Grogan. She was the inspiration, and she also gave me a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita, and I used a couple of lines out of it for the song – ‘seaside arms’.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“There were girls here with fire-engine-red lips, and boys with such pronounced eyeliner that it looked permanent. And as you moved back to the dancefloor, the music overwhelmed you: Yellow Magic Orchestra, Space, Ultravox, Eno, Fad Gadget, Sparks, Grace Jones, Thomas Leer, Cerrone, Psychedelic Furs and Bowie, obviously, lots of Bowie. On and on it went, a constant swirl of automated Germanic beats – hard-edged European disco, synth-led, bass-heavy … all very angular: Kraftwerk and Gina X, Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, and some early Roxy Music.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“I suppose I was quite intimidating, and that was because I was probably quite intimidated. ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ got played on Gary Crowley and by David Hamilton on Radio 2, and then we got on Top of the Pops by accident. We were in the low forties, and so we weren’t eligible for Top of the Pops, but then there were two stories about why we got it: one was that Elton John wanted to play his video, and they wanted him to play live; and the other was that Shakin’ Stevens wasn’t well. So whether it was Elton or Shakin’, we got their slot. So the night before, I got a phone call from my manager, saying, ‘Do you want to do Top of the Pops?’ And we were just like, ‘Aaaaaagggghhh.’ We knew that was going to be the beginning of everything. I stayed up all night doing my hair and working out what I was going to wear, and literally from that performance on my life was never the same.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“There were a couple of Bowie twins from Hatfield in Hertfordshire. They were both tall and razor thin, and looked like a slightly more exaggerated version of David Bowie on the cover of Young Americans. Their hair was even more exaggerated: deep red with bleached streaks through the front, but also with pink highlights cascading over their eyes, and slicked back at the sides. Pencil-thin dark plucked eyebrows, very pale complexions, with black mascara. They always wore the shiniest black or red plastic dungarees. Outside the club they would wear these slightly furry leopard-skin bomber jackets, which I thought looked great. They had a mad, slurry way of talking, and kind of shouted and talked at the same time. They would jump from one subject to another in mid-sentence. They were very unusual people. Every second line was ‘Never mind the bollocks.’ They would say that three hundred times a night. Everything was ‘Never mind the bollocks.’ I know for a fact that the Sex Pistols got the name for their album from the twins. They both earned a living selling hot dogs. One worked on Charing Cross Road, the other down by Trafalgar Square. They were mad. If you stopped to talk to them, they would always be arguing with someone. Man or woman, they always had the same line: ‘Now listen, sweetheart: never mind the bollocks.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Neil Tennant: I liked anything that had a slightly artificial construct to it. I’ve never really been that interested by authentic music. I think authenticity is a style. But I loved Bowie when he went electric with Low and ‘Heroes’, and I really loved electronic music. Although I wasn’t officially gay at this point, I had gay friends who I would occasionally go to nightclubs with, and you would hear what we would think of as gay disco music. That was heavily electronic. I really loved electronic music, like Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine, and at the same time I loved new-wave music. I liked the pop end of it, the Jam and stuff like that. Then the Human League came along, and OMD’s first album was great. Then, of course, at the same time you had Giorgio Moroder, who wasn’t, lest we forget, cool at this point. In fact, he was quite naff. There was a designer who worked at Marvel Comics who would put on ‘I Feel Love’ because he could put it on, go to the toilet and come back, and it was still playing.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Nick Rhodes (musician): My parents would often watch Top of the Pops with me, as they were quite turned on by knowing what was going on in the charts, and I remember they actually liked Bowie. They liked him so much they took me to see him when he played the Empire Pool in Wembley, in London, in 1976, on the Station to Station tour, not once but twice. I’d become such a fan, and he had become such a focus of what I thought I wanted to do with my life at the time.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“And if you think about Soft Cell, Depeche or Human League, these were people who didn’t know what they were doing, there was no musicianship involved. There wasn’t any training; it was people’s ideas going straight down onto tape, without having to deal with all the niceties of being a good keyboard player, and it was this new whole new sound of electronic music.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Martin Gore: I honestly don’t know what was going through my head when I was doing that. There was some kind of sexuality to it that I liked and enjoyed, but I look back now and see a lot of the pictures and I’m embarrassed. But it never crossed my mind that I might be gay. I always knew I was heterosexual. Over the years I’ve met so many people that have naturally assumed I’m gay. I don’t have a problem with that. The fact that I’m not is neither here nor there.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“By 1982, the synth had become so pervasive that it became the subject of a dispute initiated by the central London branch of the Musicians’ Union. When Barry Manilow toured the UK in January, he used synths to simulate the orchestral sounds of a big band, after which the union passed a motion to ban the use of synths, drum machines and any electronic devices ‘capable of recreating the sounds of conventional musical instruments’. They were particularly concerned about the possible effect on West End theatrical productions, imagining orchestra pits full of ‘technicians’ instead of musicians.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“I mean, what is electronic music? Hip hop is electronic music, but people don’t think of it in that way necessarily. Some people when they talk about electronic music mean techno, which I love, but it’s not the only electronic music. Everything these days is electronic music.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Vince saw the potential when he left Depeche Mode: he was like a technology hoover; he realised that with the technology at his fingers he could do everything, without being in a band. The synth duo was the thing. Vince was just like, ‘Whoa!’ I don’t think he liked the band dynamic, just because it’s too much discussion and too many egos – ‘All I need is a good singer and I can do the rest myself.’ And so the synth-pop duo was born – the Eurythmics, Soft Cell, Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Steve Strange: I ran a very tight ship in terms of my door policy. I wanted creative-minded pioneers there who looked like a walking piece of art, not some drunken, beery lads. The best move I made was turning Mick Jagger away at the door. He was wearing trainers.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Neil Tennant: The whole renaissance of British pop starts with Gary Numan and ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’. He took the David Bowie thing and reduced it to a black shirt and a pair of black jeans.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Sting (singer, songwriter): I have been perceived as an arrogant person, but I don’t see that. I think I have a lot of self-esteem. I feel very happy with myself at the moment. I’m successful, I’m happy, I’ve got a good marriage, good children, and all that sustains me. I stand and fall on my own feet. I’ve always been confident, and even when I wasn’t, I could pretend that I was. I have always been able to mask my fears, which is what I suppose was perceived as arrogance. I react to criticism pretty well.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“David Bowie: By 1985, I was something I never wanted to be: I was a well-accepted artist. I had started appealing to people who bought Phil Collins records. I suddenly didn’t know my audience and, worse, I didn’t care about them. I always looked OK in clothes – I was kind of a target for designers, always. They sort of made a beeline for me and tried to get me to wear their things. But I guess it was up to me to choose which ones I would wear.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“The eighties would continue to evolve, driven by ever more mutations of the LinnDrum, the Fairlight CMI, the 808 drum machine and various versions of the Roland synthesizer.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Martin Gore (musician): To us, the synthesizer was the punk instrument. It was an instant, do-it-yourself tool. Because it was still new, its potential seemed limitless.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“Sade Adu: I was pretty much one of the lads, but I was an old soul even when I was a child. I grew up on a council estate in a village [in Essex]. It was the epitome of the English village. Our family was accepted really well. I had an older brother who was always very protective of me. My mum was a single parent, which was pretty unusual back then. Even more unusual was that she had two black kids, and the village was pure white as the driven snow. But we were accepted and there were no problems, no questions or conflicts because we were different.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

“To enter the Blitz, you had to negotiate your way past Strange on the door; he once correctly turned away the ridiculous Mick Jagger for arriving dressed in a baseball cap and trainers. You also had to look different, extravagantly different, which meant dressing up, wearing make-up and experimenting with gender roles (and that was just the boys). Those bands that were inspired by the Blitz crowd were later packaged and promoted as New Romantics or futurists, but there was nothing calculating about the early pioneers of the scene: they were sincerely, uninhibitedly weird.”
― Dylan Jones, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics