David Buckley > Quotes

“Bowie drew our attention to the fact that a person could play the part of a rock star before actually becoming one.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“The year 1968 was also ground zero for popular music in Germany. Karl Bartos, in 1968 a 16-year-old gifted classical musician, puts it like this: ‘We don’t have the blues in our genes and we weren’t born in the Mississippi Delta. There were no black people in Germany. So instead we thought we’d had this development in the twenties which was very, very strong and was audio-visual. We had the Bauhaus school before the war; and then after the war we had tremendous people like Karlheinz Stockhausen and the development of the classical and the electronic classical. This was very strong and it all happened very close to Düsseldorf, in Cologne, and all the great composers at that time came there. During the late forties up until the seventies they all came to Germany; people like John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer, and they all had this fantastic approach to modern music, and we felt it would make more sense to see Kraftwerk as part of that tradition more than anything else.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“We had to redefine our musical culture. Not only our musical culture, however: at the end of the sixties all German artists had the same problems. Writers, directors, painters … all of them had to invent a new language.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“Tellingly, Ralf has revealed himself as an Internet sceptic. One suspects he thinks the World Wide Web has made things too easy for people, certainly too easy to ‘pollute’ the world with the meaningless and the inconsequential. ‘I am not a fan of the Internet, I think it’s overrated. Intelligent information is still intelligent information and an overflow of nonsense does not really help. In Germany it’s called Datenmüll: data rubbish.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“I tell you what completely took the biscuit for me – the song ‘Tonight’ with Tina Turner. Now she was really good, but I just thought, This record is so poppy.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“Being a (male) Bowie fan meant that your schoolmates branded you a ‘poof’, too.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“If Bowie ever fails, it’s almost always an interesting failure, which is the mark of a great artist.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“Secretly, many punks were in love with Genesis and Pink Floyd, but to say that in an interview would have been the end of a bright career. And,”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“One of the songs which certainly impacted greatly in the summer of 1977 was a song which sounded as if Kraftwerk had gone potty and recruited a bona fide American soul singer. In fact, it wasn’t Kraftwerk, but Italian musician and producer Giorgio Moroder. ‘One day in Berlin,’ says Bowie, ‘Eno came running in and said, “I have heard the sound of the future.” … He puts on “I Feel Love”, by Donna Summer … He said, “This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.” Which was more or less right.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“On 2 October 2002, Bowie returned, triumphantly, to the Hammersmith Odeon (now known as the Carling Apollo), a venue whose place in Bowie lore had been guaranteed”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“He did have Melissa at that point, and she was very nice. But he’s a very complex individual”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“Art is the one place where we can crash our plane and walk away from it. BRIAN ENO When”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“outside of my family, the biggest thing in my life. I’d had fights over him, I’d got beaten up because of him.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“Eno’s cards contained such directives as ‘Listen to the quiet voice’, ‘Fill every beat with something’, ‘Emphasize the flaws’, ‘Mute and continue’ and ‘Use an unacceptable colour’. One of Eno’s most apposite maxims was ‘Honour thy error as a hidden intention’. During the recording of the Bowie/Eno triptych (Low, “Heroes” and Lodger), mistakes, chance and random influences were to be built into the compositional processes as if they had been intended.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“he had decided to record with the pint-sized but perfectly formed Scottish belter, Lulu. Lulu had been seriously hitless for more than a wee while (in fact, since 1969, when she was advocating the joys of ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’), and her career had slipped into the variety twilight zone of guest slots on the Morecambe and Wise Show and suchlike.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“Maybe I was drinking and drugging more than I should have done. Well, in fact, I know I was for Black Tie White Noise and Let’s Dance.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“Bowie clearly at ease and enjoying himself. In Dublin he reportedly said to the 16,000 audience, ‘Tiocfaidh Ar Lia’, ‘our day will come’. ‘He said it near the start,”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“If it was too windy sixty feet up, Bowie couldn’t perform the song for fear of toppling off his mounting and becoming a rock’n’roll casualty. For the 1987 tour, as if in a fit”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“While Bowie was the great photogenic pop icon, his work about characters and masks, Eno’s art was in disappearance: ‘… Eno’s object was to eliminate himself from his work, to minimise his “degree of participation”, to cleanse his art of the idea of the individual artist,’ wrote Simon Frith and Howard Horne in their book Art Into Pop. Eno was interested in systems music, music that almost played itself and followed repetitive patterns. Bowie was interested in dramatic gestures and melodic sweeps.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“Asked why he thought Florian had left, Wolfgang Flür’s reply was terse, but probably accurate: ‘Too old, not necessary any more, enough money, especially no more flying: he was tired of all that. I think he should have done it earlier, much earlier.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“crouching on his hands and knees, peering through a magnifying glass and pointing out sites where UFOs were going to land.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“Punk was the politicised pop experience again,’ is Peter Saville’s assessment. ‘It was for a generation for whom the established music scene wasn’t working … by the time you are floating helium balloons over Battersea Power Station you are not speaking for 15 year olds on housing estates. Pop had lost its authenticity and punk was super-authentic. Punk was the band standing next to you having a drink at the bar rather than ultra-beings that you queued up with three thousand others to watch. Suddenly music was part of your reality again.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“I could only use the formula I knew. Which was, you call a song ‘China Girl’, it better sound Asian. You call a song ‘Let’s Dance’, you damn well better make sure people dance to it.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story

“Invited round to meet Ava Cherry’s mother and father, Bowie finished off his meal by bringing out a phial of coke and snorting right in front of them.”
― David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story