David Toop Quotes

#1. Sometimes I'd like everybody who is stuck, or lost, or vacant to stay that way and keep silent for as long as it takes, but that's the critic in me talking.

David Toop

#2. We [with David Cunningham] did do Top Of The Pops. It was an eye-opener. I mean, one of the things that was so interesting - I've talked about this a few times recently, and people can't believe it - they used to do this thing called tape switch with the Musicians Union.

David Toop

#3. Dub music is like a long echo delay, looping through time ... turning the rational musical order into an ocean of sensation.

David Toop

#4. If you run out of new ideas when you are very young, then it's a problem of talent; If you run out of new ideas when you get older, it may be that there's nothing left to say, or it may be that core ideas demand repeated attention ...

David Toop

#5. I don't mean I give the same intensity to everything I do - if I did that, I'd be dead, but I'm very conscious, I make notes, and I have a fairly good idea of what's happening in my life.

David Toop

#6. I was at a time of my life of making choices, I suppose: am I a writer, am I a visual artist? And when I was a teenager. I thought I would be a film-maker. Am I a musician? If so, what kind of musician am I?

David Toop

#7. Sound: always in a state of emergence or decay

David Toop

#8. I had the idea to do an anthology about instrument-making.

David Toop

#9. I guess we all had that work ethic. None of us were rock stars, so if you had time in a studio, it was a big, big deal: you're not going to sit around taking drugs and drinking and waste it, you'll do something.

David Toop

#10. One of the things about grief - I wouldn't generalise, because everybody responds to tragedies in different ways - but I had a huge amount of energy.

David Toop

#11. I'd been listening to African-American music since the first record I ever bought, which was by Sam Cooke. And it sounds more like my private thoughts that I never thought I would be able to articulate - I never thought I would be able to express publicly.

David Toop

#12. I think I was like [a game of] skittles, knocked apart by this wooden ball, and there's a strength to that: you're not too self-conscious about what you're doing, so you're not too worried about it.

David Toop

#13. If I'd thought, "I can't really play this instrument," I wouldn't have done it! But I didn't care, you know. I didn't care!

David Toop

#14. Like a fly bouncing uselessly off a closed window, I'm caught at a moment when the effort of finding new ways to perceive the world feels just out of reach for me.

David Toop

#15. There's a sense of trajectories that are extraordinary about a life like this. You can reconnect with people and go back to playing with them after years and years of not even knowing if they're alive.

David Toop

#16. Every time when it comes to writing a book, I think, "I'm the last person in the world that should be doing this, I don't know anything, I can't do this." And I went through years of that with Into The Maelstrom.

David Toop

#17. People don't have to put you in a box. You can have the confidence to move across, and combine and learn from each different practice. They inform each other.

David Toop

#18. I needed a huge amount of energy to cope with my life. I had a huge amount of energy where stuff was concerned: it was as if all this unconscious material had been unleashed.

David Toop

#19. One of the nicest things is that I still get, very ambiguously, people saying to me, "Oh, I'm just reading your book." And I say, "Which one, for God's sake, I've done six now!" "Oceans of Sound".

David Toop

#20. The longer we live, the more we are obliged to confront the deeper meaning of what it is we do.

David Toop

#21. Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art.

David Toop

#22. I'd entirely forgotten about Pass The Distance, and then I went to Japan in 2000, and was asked to do interviews with all these journalists, who were showing up with bootlegs of this record, asking me to talk about it. I was astonished. It kind of gained momentum.

David Toop

#23. New ideas emerge of their own free will if they are allowed to.

David Toop

#24. I had ideas about music and sound and listening and time and so on that I wanted to pursue as an individual, and by doing that book, Brian [Eno] opened the door, and he decided to do a record based loosely on the book.

David Toop

#25. The Musicians Union declared you couldn't mime on Top Of The Pops, which is obviously impossible, if you've got a studio-based record that you'd worked on for a year or something. And there were a lot of terrible performances. Because on Top Of The Pops, you were just thrown onstage.

David Toop

#26. Paul [ Burwell] and I had also got interested in making books. We'd been working with Bob Cobbing, the sound poet, since the beginning of the 70s, and Bob had this press called Writers Forum.

David Toop

#27. I do still have dips of confidence or [can think] everything I do is rubbish.

David Toop

#28. I was working in, being a single parent with a grieving child of five years old. It was horrendous. I couldn't go out much, because I had my daughter to look after. So people used to come round, and Tony Harrington from The Wire came round.

David Toop

#29. Logically there is nothing new to say about the New. Or maybe it's just a problem of articulating unfamiliar perceptions.

David Toop