David Sheppard > Quotes

“Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.’ (John Cage)”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“Eno remains ‘a restless futurist’,”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“In a 1975 Playboy interview, David Bowie caused a furore when he opined that ‘Hitler was the first rock star. He staged a whole country.’ Oddly, Bryan Ferry would get into similar hot water in a 2007 interview with a German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag, in which he praised Nazi iconography as ‘just amazing’ and ‘really beautiful’ and was later forced to make a public statement of apology.”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“In place of bottom-of-the-bill humiliation and hand-to-mouth motel living, Roxy Music were now a major draw – and they lived up to it, insisting on staying only in plush hotels and grazing at restaurants with Michelin stars to spare.”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“One of the things that happens when you’re going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it’s in that sense that “tortured” souls sometimes produce great work.”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“A few intermittent pounds were hardly enough, however, and – reluctantly – the comrades soon found themselves looking for jobs. It was the first and last time Eno would be driven to this unconscionable extreme. Eschewing his more outrageous garments and armed with his diploma, he wandered into the Camberwell Labour Exchange in the late summer and found himself a placement as an assistant paste-up artist with a local advertising free-sheet called the South Londoner. As he confessed to Lester Bangs, Eno took to the work surprisingly easily: ‘I didn’t hate it. I became very successful at it. I started off at the bottom, doing a very menial job, and in the four months I was there I got promoted again and again and again, and I ended up earning four or five times as much as I’d started with, and sort of running the office. And then I realized that I could carry on doing that and never do anything else, because I wasn’t doing anything else.’ The ‘anything else’ Eno was failing to do was music: ‘I kept saying to myself, “Oh well, I’ll do some music this weekend”, and then I wouldn’t, I’d be too tired and I’d say, “Oh, I’ll do it next weekend”, and then I wouldn’t do it, so I just gave it up after a while. It was exactly what I knew a job would be like – not horrible enough to make you want to get out, just well paying enough to make you comfortable and to keep putting things off.”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“You see, the problem is that people, particularly people who write, assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I even remember the words, actually, let alone think that those are the centre of the meaning. For me, music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones of those, or point up certain others that aren’t really in there, or aren’t worth saying, or something.’*”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“as soon as anything even remotely one percent promising starts to happen, you really jump on it with great enthusiasm and build on it quickly.”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“Bryan Ferry would abandon overt glam threads in favour of classically tailored tuxedos, US military uniforms and an infamous gaucho look. Ironically, Ferry then began to draw a considerable gay male following while Eno, slavered in cosmetics and done up like a camp Christmas tree, became – much to his own satisfaction – an unlikely object of lust for legions of adolescent girls.”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“In a roomful of shouting people, the one who whispers becomes interesting.”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“Eno, in leopard-skin chemise and trowelled-on foundation looked sleek, seedy and android-like – although his clenched pose suggested a man passing a troublesome stool.”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“Judy Nylon, who as a child had sought succour from her parents’ escapist ‘exotica’ albums and regularly drifted off to sleep to the lulling vibraphones of Martin Denny’s Quiet Village, recalls a slightly different version of events: ‘So it was pouring rain in Leicester Square,”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“create parameters, set it off, see what happens’,”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“To Roxy Music and EG’s palpable relief, on 2 May 1972 the band were finally signed on as Island Records recording artists.”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

“In a roomful of shouting people, the one who whispers becomes interesting.’ (Peter Schimdt)”
― David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno