Roy Harper

When I was 15, I was wearing sandals and corduroys, Guernsey, striped pullover, a beard that was hardly there, shades and a beret, and the goal was hanging out.

Remember, this was a world that was still ethnically separated. I was thirteen and ignorant of the social situation in America, but I felt these records were better than what my own culture was turning out.

If humanity was still in the feral state, we wouldn't have any need for these huge conurbations that we have now, that have turned us into a different bunch all together. In the feral state we would be much more secure, much more familiar with each other, much more mentally well-balanced.

I've taken a stand against religion for as long I've been able to write and think.

I'm careful, controlled, bodily conservative: if someone offered me a pill I'd only ever take a half.

At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It's like therapy for me, because it exposes what I'm really thinking.

I wanted to modernize music, but more than that, to completely modernize people's attitudes towards life in general.

In cities, people go to work and all walk there together, like some arterial flow. And there's a certain desolation about it, an alienation that we all experience.

It's fantastic to put your hands in the earth. I enjoy spending my time in heaven here. I don't care what you say, this is my heaven.

As a really young child, I was listening to the echoes of the age before, music hall and stuff like that, as well as classical bits on the radio.

I'm attending to my legacy, making sure that it travels the universe in the best shape I can get it into. For as long as I'm alive, I'll still be its interpreter.

I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.