Q: You seem pretty comfortable working in a variety of styles, whether rock, pop, jazz, or avant-garde.
Robert Wyatt singer/drummer of Soft Machine fame: In the end, there are notes and intervals and chords and rhythms. Some I like, some I don't. But they are actually very often, in all these different kinds of musics, all these musicians from different styles are actually picking and choosing from the same tiny little bunch of notes, and the same little bunches of possible rhythms, and so on. Underneath the kind of superficial differences of style, the kind of music's haircut, if you like, or the current clothes the music is wearing, when you're actually working on a piece of music with at least one good idea in it, that good idea is not really fixed or tied to a style or an idiom. It's a good idea. There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas. So anybody who has a good idea and I can deal with it suits me fine.