Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
I would be doomed if I didn't invent humor in my life. When I was young, I had all these punk and performance-art bands, dressed in costumes and painting the room and getting kicked out by police. Now when I perform I still feel the stage is more than just where you put your instruments. It's where you can do whatever you feel like.
I heard opera all day long. From the time I was 9 years old, I was imitating the singers; later I studied opera. But we also got Western television and radio, from the Americans in West Berlin. When I was 11 years old, I turned into a hippie and gave flowers to policemen. And when I was 21 and left Berlin for London, I became a punk.
When we moved to England in 1986, I was ten years old and I didn't know anything about punk or hip hop. The only words I knew in English were 'dance' and 'Michael Jackson.' We got put in a flat in Mitchum, and the council gave us second hand furniture, second hand clothes and a second hand radio that I took to bed with me every night.
I just try not to subscribe to the ways of celebrity. I'm not a celebrity, I'm a working actor. A lot of the events - the parties and the premieres that people go to to get noticed - I'm just not into. I'll hang out with my friends, go see punk shows, read at home. At the same time, I have a production company, which is a lot of work.
'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.
The whole punk scene is, of course, responsible for the Go-Go's ever getting created. Because before punk rock happened, you couldn't start a band if you didn't know how to play an instrument. But when punk happened it was like, 'Oh, it doesn't matter if you can play or not. Go ahead, make a band.' And that's exactly what the Go-Go's did.
If you look at who emerged on the horizon 12 to 18 months after ECW stopped running shows, I think it's very reasonable to believe that we would have picked up CM Punk and several of the other young stars that emerged in the independent scene in the early part of that decade. Punk obviously is the one that I would hope I would have noticed.
I was born in San Francisco. I was raised in Oakland, so I'm, like, super Bay Area born, and, you know, it's just really multicultural up there, and there's a lot of subcultures just from, like, anything, like from rockabilly to, like, crazy punk scenes to, you know, a huge rap scene, and there's just all kinds of things you can do out there.
Prince is my favorite ever. I've liked Prince since... It's been a really long time. Even in junior high. I used to only like punk for a while, and I had all these rules for what kinds of groups were cool, and who was not cool, but as soon as I saw this one Prince video... It just broke all those rules. I was like, 'I love this no matter what.'
A lot of the things I loved the most growing up were, on the surface, kind of challenging or impenetrable. I loved Andy Kaufman, and half his shows, people would walk out in a rage. I love punk rock, which is notoriously music that doesn't always sound very inviting or appealing but, I think, unquestionably has the most heart, the most integrity.
I remember when I was about 15 and still listened to Pet Shop Boys and Chas And Dave, some lad at school lent me a Blur tape, and it had on it a song called 'Bank Holiday.' I said, 'What's this? I liked that tape, but that one song is a bit fast'. He said, 'Yeah, it's punk. It depends what mood you're in.' And then something sort of clicked in me.
With Punk, I consider him to be like a brother to me. He's one of the guys who took me under his wing when I first came. So we've been able to maintain a good relationship. And there are very few people in the business that you can call true friends, so I consider Punk to be that and more. So yes, 'road wife' is the term we used to sum that all up.
You never know with Punk. He is definitely somebody who does things his own way, and I think the biggest thing is that you can never count out what his next move will be. I think no one would have predicted his move to UFC - nobody would have predicted a lot of things he does - so whatever he chooses to do, he will do what feels best in the moment.
It's hard to imagine the whole punk movement without The Velvet Underground. I toured with them when they did their reunion tour, and no one sounds like that; they are a very unique-sounding band. They have a lot of noise, they have a viola, they have a drummer that's standing up, certainly they have influenced my guitar playing, but hopefully after 12 records you start to sound like yourself.
I went to a fancy dress party as a punk. I went through a stage of being a wannabe punk from the '70s. So, my next-door neighbours were like hardcore punks and I went to see The Vibrators and came home with a T-shirt that said "The Vibrators". My mum said: "You're not going out in that!" But I was really into it. I did soon grow out of it. But that's probably the most embarrassing story I have. I really am just quite normal.
