«We were very conscious that we were plunging into rock without any real knowledge of, or experience in, the medium. We had played Cage and Stockhausen, African and Indian music, and I thought we could simply bring all that to rock. But we knew almost nothing about the roots of rock’n’roll. We all improvised, of course, but in a contemporary-music style. In retrospect, creating a rock band with no rock musicians was a bad decision on my part. Still, I considered myself the most eclectic composer on the planet: I was confident that whatever the others couldn’t do I could write. (…) So. The grand experiment… was it just a failure? Certainly it was for us: friendships were destroyed, and the band was hardly a career stepping stone for anyone. But, over the decades, I’ve become aware of a shadow public that thought us mythic, and the current wave of British rock was credited the band with originality and integrity. One thing is certain: we were unlike anything. Before or since.»
Joseph Byrd
