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My family is all musicians - my dad plays drums, my mom plays flute, my older brother plays drums, my little brother plays drums and piano. For some reason, I didn't get the memo, so I just play bass.
I never have met any heroes - except one. The exception is Ian Anderson, flute player extraordinaire, creative musical talent for more than 40 years, and the man most associated with the band Jethro Tull.
Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap.
My real fantasy if I was to drop out would be to live in a mobile home and be a hippie and drive around festivals and have millions of children - children with dreadlocks and nose rings - and play the flute.
I have to report to those of you who think diamonds make a difference that I cannot tell what it is. Seriously, as you all know, they make no difference at all. They just make the flute look a little more special.
All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.
My 22-minute film, which I called 'The Sword and the Flute', turned out to be a romantic film about India made by someone who had never been to India, but who already had very romantic feelings about everything Indian.
This big part flies off on the floor. The other part goes like this and lands in my foot! Standing up! It's standing in my foot! Right in the side of my foot. The flute glass. I think I'm like in one of my own pictures.
I played the flute in elementary school, but when I got into high school, they didn't have any flutes; they gave me a clarinet and said, 'Play it in the same way, just hold in a different position.' I really didn't care much for it.
I remember my sisters, they loved a movie called 'The Naked Island.' And the flute was actually playing the main theme. A Japanese movie. A beautiful movie from 1961. I remember hearing this music with a flute many, many times a day at home.
Producing isn't just making beats on a beat machine. It's bringing together these string players with this flute player and this singer, and telling them to all work in the key of C major... You bring these people together and let them all cook.
It's just an ice bucket with a bottle in it. The two flute glasses are little tray. I got to shut the curtains. I'm in my boxer shorts and shirt. I'm going to take a bath and go to bed. But I want to shut the blinds so it's really dark in the room.
When I was a freshman in high school, I got a letterman jacket, which you'd think would be great stock. The jacket had the big S on it, for Santa Monica. But rather than having a football or a baseball on the S, I had a little nine iron. Girls thought it was a flute.
After I came out of surgery - I was in the hospital for five weeks - I found that I gravitated toward very gentle sounds: chant music, solo bamboo flute sounds, a laid-back record of my own called 'Inside.' And the music became a very real part of my recovery process.
I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.
I took lessons for about everything you could imagine - gymnastics to karate to flute and piano. My mom always definitely kept me in some kind of class or program, but for guitar, I kinda gave up on then kinda just taught myself. Same thing with piano. I've never been good with following lessons.
Ours was a very progressive Protestant family, but my parents were God-loving rather than God-fearing. We went to church, and I still go with my mum and dad when I return home - it's a family thing. I played flute in my dad's marching band, but I had an integrated upbringing. We had a lot of Catholic friends.
When I talk of primordial innocence, I hear it in Sufi music with the nay flute. I see it in Coptic icons, in most traditional art, particularly art of the American Indian. I find the texts extraordinarily beautiful and very childlike and very simple. I've been particularly interested in American Indian texts.
I would prefer to live forever in perfect health, but if I must at some time leave this life, I would like to do so ensconced on a chaise longue, perfumed, wearing a velvet robe and pearl earrings, with a flute of champagne beside me and having just discovered the answer to the last problem in a British cryptic crossword.
I started piano like my sisters. After one year or two, I didn't like it anymore. Then, because I like trumpet, I played the cornet. When you are 7, you can't play trumpet - you play cornet. And something didn't go well. The teacher was too hard. Too rough. Suddenly, there was this instrument, the flute, that I could immediately play.
When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.
