Quotes

[speaking on The Weakest Link (2000), 2005] It's got a bit sad, really. I've stopped drinking, I don't smoke anymore, I've stopped getting married and I play golf and eat shepherd's pie.

[speaking about his keyboard playing] I avoid preset sounds wherever possible, and all the sounds I use I have edited.

I joined Yes in July 1971. I had heard Yes live, as The Strawbs had supported them at a gig in Hull. I thought they were amazing - incredibly different.

I'm always writing or playing because that is my life.

[speaking about Jon Anderson] Jon is the only person I know who cares about the planet but lives on another one.

[on progressive rock] I've always believed that these days there is hardly a band or musician anywhere who haven't used some element of prog in their music. It's all about freedom of expression, which in my case is often in seven different time signatures!

[on Freddie Mercury] I only got to meet Freddie a few times out in Montreux and got on great with him, an absolute character.

Bohemian Rhapsody broke every single rule. It broke the rules in radio too because it became the most played radio track and yet it didn't fit into any of the genre that it should have done.

Back in the '60s, you'd play anywhere, you really didn't care, you just wanted to play, and some of the working men's clubs and some of the places we went to, to put it crudely, were shit-holes. And that's upgrading them.

I know Radiohead say they aren't prog but, sorry chaps, you are, and it's brilliant.

[on the 1980s] Prog was as popular as a condom machine in the Vatican.

[on The Six Wives of Henry VIII] We had just one decent review, and that was from an angling magazine up in Grimsby. Even Melody Maker said that the album wasn't fit to be played in a lift.

[on Antonio Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons'] 'The Four Seasons' isn't just a work of genius, it's also a blueprint for the kind of music I write.

I've always said there's a great connection between the Baroque period and shall we say the late '60s and the '70s in modern day rock music or popular music, because it has that same formula. It's complicated but sounds simple, and there's an art to playing it.