Quotes

While punk raged, the Brits were handing out statuettes to Cliff Richard and Shirley Bassey. At the height of acid house, they were rewarding Phil Collins, Fairground Attraction and Cliff Richard again. It's not merely being facetious to suggest that ultimately it doesn't matter who wins at the Brits. There is something weirdly transient about the awards: you would be hard pushed to find anyone who can remember who won what last year, let alone a decade ago. It's like a musical equivalent of Ski Sunday. No one watches it to see who wins, they tune in only in the hope of seeing something go disastrously wrong. When it doesn't - and it hasn't for over a decade - the Carnival of Mayhem immediately evaporates from the collective memory. (Commenting on the Brit Awards in 2007)

We now see the Eighties through this slightly rosy lens of nostalgia and nostalgia is a form of curation. You cut out the bits you don't like. You cut out all the crap bits. You have Madonna and Prince, who are interesting. Everything else that you got, or you were going to get, on Radio One or Top of the Pops (1964), was just crap. I mean, it was just absolute rubbish.

[reviewing a concert by Martin Creed] This show is provocative only in that it seems less like a gig than an experiment to see how charmless and pleased with himself a man can appear before the audience storm the stage and physically attack him.