Quotes

[on presenting television coverage of Live Aid (1985)] I did feel some unease about having to rub shoulders with, and in some cases interview, a lot of pop stars who I didn't actually detest personally but whose music I was well known for not liking. So at one point I found myself sitting around with the holy trinity of Sting, Phil Collins and the ubiquitous Howard Jones; performers whose music for me epitomized everything that was bland, mainstream, insipid, tragic, gave rock and roll a bad name.

There have been rumblings on the Radio 3 message board about too much world music, but, really life's too short to even respond to these people, if they're going to advertise their own narrow-mindedness.

I've never seen as many Dolly Parton records on sale anywhere as I did in Zimbabwe, and I've seen Kenny Rogers tapes on sale in Timbuktu.

[speaking in 2002] Some of the most exciting music being made now, I think, is from Africans.

I've met U2 and on a lot of what, politically, Bono and his pals will campaign about I'm entirely in sympathy. I just don't particularly want to hear their damn records.

[on turning down U2 when he was Entertainments Secretary for Leeds University Union] I turned them down on the grounds that they were a big bag of wind. I'm afraid nothing they've recorded in 30 years has changed my view.

There are no real characters anymore. I don't think music is as essential today in young people's lives as it was in our generation. We've got other distractions. When you're holding up the Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand or the Kaiser Chiefs as the saviours of rock and roll, then God help us. In the immediate post-punk years, those three groups wouldn't have got a look in.

[on the death of George Michael] Here we go, again... Brace yourselves for the now routine hysterical over-reaction, and obligatory bogus sentimentality, which always - these days - follows the unfortunate premature deaths of these figures, regardless of how flimsy, insignificant and lightweight their cultural contribution happened to be. I'm very sorry George Michael has died young. But please spare me the predictable onion-from-pocket outpourings, claiming he was 'one of the greats'. No, he was not. (Really? Up there with Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell, Hank Williams, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Van Morrison? I could go on...) George Michael was, in reality, a very successful, yet frivolous, glib and fleeting pop star. Can we please keep a sense of proportion?