24 Quotes by David Toop

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.

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.

Sound: always in a state of emergence or decay.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.