“Those bands that meet through ads in the fucking paper, what do they have to talk about besides their business plan and schedules?” – The Strokes’ Fab Moretti

“I fell absolutely in love. We couldn’t do anything about it because he was married, and Priscilla was about to have Lisa Marie, but oh my God! It was electric.” - Nancy Sinatra on you- know- who

“I detest elitism in music, it’s one of the ugliest things. As some quite famous person whose name escapes me said, ‘13-year old girls deserve to hear decent music too!’” – Alex Kapranos

“It’s third time lucky, I feel really good about this record deal. When you’ve been in a band for 13 years, when you’ve been signed twice and you’ve basically been involved with about seven different labels, I think you’re bullshit-ometer becomes very strong.” – Glen Hansard

CS Lewis went to Campbell College and Samuel Beckett taught at it. Actually, Beckett had a great line about ‘Campbell’s pupils being the cream of Ulster – rich and thick!’ I certainly wasn’t rich, but one out of two ain’t bad!”
– Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody on his alma mater

“I think I was about two years in some sort of trance. I didn’t go out very much, I lived in Howth and sort of didn’t know where to be putting myself a lot of the time. I woke up really when I met Cian’s mother, that was when I started feeling like a human being.” – Liam O Maonlai on life after the Hothouse Flowers’ late ‘80s heyday

“A good song is a necessary song. It has to exist for the songwriter to be more comfortable afterwards. It’s like a kind of psychological exorcism.” – Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel

“The idea of being single for the rest of my life doesn’t bother me, because I’ve got my ambitions now.” – Juliet Turner

“Today people tend to sit around playing sessions and they’re bored out of their fuckin’ brains. I find Irish music today very boring sometimes.” – Danu’s Donnchadh Hough

“The sandbag thing was half-true, but it’s not at all what it seems. If we were to build a wall on the outside there would have been planning permission issues, so we had the idea to build this giant wall of sandbags on the outside, sort of like a pyramid. It did look pretty crazy, but it was a cheap and easy way of doing it.” - Kevin Shields explains why he barricaded his studio with sandbags during his My Bloody Valentine days

“I did nothing in the ‘90s apart from walking the dog. It was a lost decade for me. I became alienated from the music business and thought my life was finished.” – Little Steven Van Zandt didn’t anticipate the emergence of one Tony Soprano

“What’s the strangest thing we’ve ever been asked to sign? Breasts. But they’re not strange, they’re nice. Have I signed many? A few, not many. Enough!” – Super Furry Animals’ Daffyd Ieuan

“I was standing right there that night. So, y’know, I knew from the get-go what the real truth was. And so when he tried to say that it was self-defence, I mean, we obviously kinda knew that wasn’t true.” – The Von Bondies’ Carrie Smith on bandmate Jason Jason Stollsteimer’s scrap with Jack White

“We drove up in a stretch limo with me dressed as Robin the Boy Wonder, our agent Steve Strange as Batman, Rick as the Grim Reaper and Charlotte – typecast as ever – as a witch.” – Tim Wheeler recalls a party at Dave Grohl’s Hollywood residence

“In interviews I become a character, I become Crazy Mike who drinks too much and does loads of drugs. But that’s cool, it helps me sell records as well.” – Mike Skinner

“When somebody asks you ‘Will you marry me?’ in a way they’re really asking you ‘Will you allow me to take you for granted?’” – Andrea Corr

MUSIC:

“There’s no animosity between me and Louis, although my wife Woody will never forgive him for the way he treated me and the way he treats other people. It doesn’t bother me how he treats me, but it bothers me how the kids on those programmes are cast aside.”
– Ronan Collins on Louis Walsh

“I had the bizarre experience of explaining to Terry Wogan by email that not only did we want to use his picture, but it was also going to be in the style of an old Soviet propaganda poster – Wogan as Stalin!”
– Alex Kapranos

“One of Michael Jackson’s wives said that when he was with her he spoke in a different voice. I never heard that voice. I always heard the little boy voice. I was presenting an award to him at a party at the Smithsonian, and he turned to me and said, ‘Walter, I have to tinkle.’ Gaaawd!” – Ex-CBS Records supremo Walter Yetnikoff

“I feel very on the outside of things looking in, observing the differences. I find it fascinating and love it because it is the opposite. I don’t like being in any of the places for too long, I like making the jump.” – PJ Harvey on life in LA

“People think he’s this Peter Grant-style Svengali who dangles you out of the window if the doesn’t get his own way, but he’s actually really gentle.” – The Rapture’s Luke Jenner on Paul McGuinness

“Something that used to really bother me in Blur was that there was this attitude of, ‘Oh, this week we’re into disco, let’s do ‘Girls & Boys’. Now we’re into Pavement and Beck, let’s do some stuff in that vein. Okay, now that’s rubbish, let’s go to Africa and hear someone play the bongos’. I had a problem with that.” – Graham Coxon
“We did have a bit of a run in with some of the farmers from the area, we let off some fireworks one night and frightened all the horses.” – Christian Datsun on how the band let off some steam during the recording of their last album

“Manson people think they are black sheep, but they’re really just sheep in black. They are going to see the ‘God of Fuck’, the shocker, and here I was shocking them in the first two minutes.” – Peaches

“You have to treat the whole Whelan’s scene with some degree of contempt, especially when there’s all that backslapping and mutual worship.”
– Mick Pyro of Republic of Loose

“They can’t believe their luck, especially when they find that I’m at home. They usually cry. Especially the Japanese, who are very emotional.” - Philomena Lynott on how Thin Lizzy fans react to her

“After ‘Fake’, we were going (whispered, slightly panicked amazement), ‘Shit!’ Cos all of our old following were kinda standing in the background going (sceptical, folded arms), ‘Dunno, lads’.” – Glen Hansard

“I see our career ‘til now as being in two parts. The first is just being happy your band’s been signed and making records. Second half you’re getting a bit wiser but you’re so fucking fatigued you haven’t got the energy to deal with people.”
– The Thrills’ Conor Deasy

“We truly have the best fans in the world – artists, musicians and writers. People dream to be in a band like we are. And I know it’s awesome.” – The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne

MOVIES:

“I can’t stand girls who are threatened by other women, and who spend their time running down the competition – that’s just so fucked up.” - Julie Delpy

“I like to think I took on those kids and beat their adorable-ness with my rocking intensity.” – Jack Black on working with a cast of school kids in School Of Rock

“You start to realise that you can almost say – I hate to say this – the worse the script, the more money they give you. It’s almost a given.” – Al Pacino on the studio system

“These people never gave one bloody cent to trying to help this poor woman, about whom they “cared so much”; they disingenuously used double-entendre or incontinent sardonicism in their creation of the title, MONSTER. They played her for all it was worth, and threw her body in the garbage dump.” – Singer Diamanda Galas wasn’t impressed by Hollywood’s treatment of Aileen Wuornos’ life in Monster

“Sometimes Jesse has said to me, why don’t you come out and just say definitively that you think I’m innocent. And that’s difficult. But for me it was important to bring the evidence to the audience and let them form their own opinion.” – Capturing The Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki

“There can’t be many roles like this played by a dwarf, and I think people were hesitant in marketing it that way. He’s now been featured in People magazine’s ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ poll.” – The Station Agent director Tom McCarthy

“It does annoy me a little that the story never went away. He was never actually up for the part. I’m as big a fan of Bruce Lee as you’ll find anywhere, and I guess if that’s what the fans choose to believe to complete the legend, then I guess they can have it.” – David Carradine on rumours that Bruce Lee was also up for the lead role in Kung Fu

“You know, if you said to a bunch of Hollywood guys that you were gonna make a movie in Ireland, they’d go, ‘Great, I always wanted to go there.’ Dublin was a bit the way people look at Iceland now. But now people want to go to New Zealand or Italy.” – Neil Jordan

“For me to continue doing what Letterman wanted me to do, which was to behave like a parody of a blue collar worker from Cleveland, there had to be some kind of pay-off. And in the end there wasn’t any.” – American Splendor star Harvey Pekar

“The Ireland that I grew up in, the Ireland that I know, is nothing like that – it’s full of young people, full of colour and full of music, none of which were ever properly represented in film.” – Cowboys & Angels director David Gleeson

“The real tragedy is that it’s rarely the idiots who get hooked. It’s usually the brighter guys at school who look out the window and think, ‘Fuck this, I’m getting out of my head.’” – Adam & Paul star Mark O’Halloran

“My mom is a big Tolstoy fan and she insisted that Liev is Ukranian for Leo. Now as I found out the people of Ukraine don’t agree with her. But mother knows best.” – Manchurian Candidate star Liev Schreiber