When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, 'That's just that ole blues singer.'
We played one warm-up gig at this bar that was kinda like that bar in 'The Blues Brothers' with the chicken wire. This place called The Brick House, in Housatonic. I really can't believe we're going to play for people in New York City. I'm terrified, but it's a small enough room. But it's really just supposed to be for the fun of it.
I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that's like my 'Blues Brothers' mission.
Lorne finally said, Do the Blues Brothers thing. The response was amazing. People went nuts.
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
Ninety percent of the research comes first. I mostly blunder around reading stuff and talking to smart people until an idea batters or oozes its way through to my narrative brain.
You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.
I have had a number of less-than-enviable moments in my life when dealing with other people. I won't attempt to blunt that by saying I am not the only one.
People beat around the bush so much, and I try to be really blunt in my music.
I know that some people shy away from what I say. They think it is too blunt, but when you don't give people that, they feel like you are being fake and you're not telling the truth. So it's like, you want me to tell the truth, but when I do, it's too much for you.
Women are not making it to the top of any profession in the world. But when I say, 'The blunt truth is that men run the world,' people say, 'Really?' That, to me, is the problem.
People are so passionate about their favourite artists making it to number 1, it almost reminds me of football fanaticism. Nowadays, it's 'One Direction' vs 'The Wanted.' Back in my day, it was 'Oasis' vs 'Blur'.
Thanks to Twitter, Reddit, web media, and social media, we have the opportunity now to kind of blur that line between the people who produce the content, the people that watch it, and instead make it a conversation, make it a real community.
I've made so many people angry that they kind of blur into one unpleasant memory of people staring at you with somewhere between passive aggression and active aggression.
As a director, what matters is how you penetrate the soul of the person in front of the camera and let the actor blur the boundaries between the character and the person themselves. In order to achieve that, I try to make people feel at ease, to be mindless of problems and be skinless and give everything to the camera.
I love attempting to play real people. I like to try and have dramatic moments as well as comedic moments, and my favorite thing is when those two lines are blurred.
When I look at music, everything is blurred, and I like it that way. I grew up like that, hanging out with different types of people who listened to so many different types of music. I never wanted to be part of any one clique. I loved it all.
How vivid is the suffering of the few when the people are few and how the suffering of nameless millions in two world wars is blurred over by numbers.
People are always asking, 'Where does Michael Pennington end and Johnny Vegas begin,' and you're going, 'It's not like that: it's blurred right across.'
Heaven can never countenance the barbarous and unmanly practice of the Britons in America, which savages would blush at, and which, if not discontinued, will soon be retaliated on Britain by a justly enraged people.
