Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not one of these people who thinks everything in the past is great and everything modern is terrible. But I do think cities should be a mix of old things and new things.
I can imagine moving out to the seaside at some point. I like Brighton, my sister lives there. I'm a seaside boy and whenever I go there, I find myself writing songs about it.
Knowing what I knew about Russia, as much as I loved the music and was fascinated by the songs and the whole idea of it, I knew it would be a very lengthy and frustrating process.
I thinks it really interesting how they throw the world music samples in there. I often wonder what it would be like to do something like that, but use my lyrics and my kind of style.
Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.
We just kind saw the images and knew the cliches, so to have the opportunity to go there and learn something about Russian music and about Russian people and to see things apart from being a tourist.
The albums I did around that time probably wouldn't have been the same without Ecstacy. The first three Soft Cell albums... were all really albums that were just done around Ecstacy and the whole E feeling.
A lot of the early songs I wrote were about the experience of going to London and meeting rent boys and transvestites and drag queens. A lot of my early material is that: the wide-eyed adventures of a middle-class boy.
The way the business things work in Russia is you have to meet people, you have to go through a certain amount of etiquette and business things are done just simply by a shake of the hand and whether they like you or not.
What was great about the 80s was that you still had record companies who would get behind developing you as an artist. You had these bonkers heads of department and A&R people who, even after a flop album, would let you make another one.
For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar.
On my Instagram, I'm always keeping a record of things being pulled down in Soho and shutters being closed. Every city - and London more than anywhere - has got to be a vibrant mix of all different things. We can't allow it to become a monoculture.
I was quite naïve, a boy from Southport. When I went to art college in Leeds, I lived in a basement flat, and I heard clunking on the stairs all night, and I thought it was just nurses going to work on the night shift at the local hospital! Then I found out it was all working girls upstairs. I suppose I came from a protected background and had my eyes opened wide by that side of city life.