Quotes

I mean, everybody goes on about how great The Tube (1982) was. All I remember about it was hours and hours of people like fucking Phil Collins.

[on the 1980s] I thought the music was a bit rubbish. I liked The Smiths. I thought New Order were good. A few good bands, some good jazz-funk around. Other than that, all I ever think of is devastation and Margaret Thatcher. The only reason we didn't have a revolution was because of the fashions. You know, pixie boots. You can't storm the Winter Palace in them. And those big shoulders, you'd never get through the doors would you?

Why is everyone so mean about Bono? I've got mates who were in a band that supported U2 and they've not got a bad word to say about any of them.

[on Echo & The Bunnymen] Good band. At one time they could have been as big as U2.

My mum, God rest her soul, was a massive Freddie Mercury fan, and every now and then she'd ask me the same question, she'd say "Was he gay?", and I'd say "Yes, mum, he was", and then she'd go "Mind you, he was a funny looking ****, weren't he?" as if to say he was too ugly to get a woman. I'm just saying how my mum saw it. She thought he had a lovely singing voice though.

The Royal Family make us so much money, don't they? Why don't we privatise them?

[on The Bee Gees] I had a go at Clive Anderson once over his calling them tossers because I thought it was completely out of order. I said to him, "Would you have said that to Mick Jagger?" and he said, "No". I said, "Well, then, treat them with the same respect".

Morrissey as a writer, I just love the way he says things, and sometimes he's saying it for a wind-up, sometimes he's saying it because he really believes it. I just love the fact that he still does it because nowadays everyone's so bland.

When you walk through the park and you see two dogs with your kids, I just say one's blind and the other one's pushing it home.

In France, the government are scared of the people. In this country, the people are scared of the government.

[on fracking] All this stuff about will it bring down energy bills, I doubt it. They said that about privatisation didn't they? They've gone up a lot more since they've been privatised.

I actually would think, and this might seem very radical, that unless you're educated by the state, you should not be allowed to work for the state or publicly funded bodies because then you're more in touch with the people. So I think the BBC should not employ anybody from public school type backgrounds, I think the civil service shouldn't be run by anyone from public school backgrounds. They should all be state educated, then they'd take more care of the state, wouldn't they?

As a woman, no matter how much feminism there is or anything else, you're always going to be judged on your looks. It's biology, isn't it, in a way? Women are judged on their looks, men, us being handsome is being really rich and powerful.

[in 2014] They always say, don't they, if you can remember the Sixties you weren't really there. If you can remember the Seventies, the police want to interview you.

Funnily enough, when I did started doing The Word (1990), I suddenly got all these posh girls coming on to me. They thought I was making loads of money and I was only on 500 nicker a week.

If a bloke goes for a woman and let's say when you're young you're kind of thinking 'well, you know, how do I get myself sorted here', and that is always seen as a terrible agenda, but in some ways a woman's agenda where she wants to meet a bloke who'll buy her a house forever, that's kind of an even worse agenda.

That's one of Thatcher's [Margaret Thatcher] great achievements, isn't it? Privatising energy. Oh, and knighting Jimmy Savile.