“My relationship with Gurdjieff? Well I never met him but I have worked with people who did know him well. I’m still in contact with them. The question is how has this affected my relationship with music? Music comes into the musicians life in the same way that Work does. It’s a quality. It’s not something you can pin down, and if as a musician you work towards becoming an instrument that music can play, it’s exactly the same for the Work. I understood this one July morning in 1981 on a sofa in Chelsea in New York. I simply woke up at 8 o’clock and jumped out of bed because when one has these little flashes you can’t sit about with them. I simply understood that something that I knew, we all know that music plays the musician and all that hippie tripe, was true and I understood it. The musician; I play music; I write Lizard; it’s ‘I’; I’m a smart-arse look at all my fast licks.We’re so busy rushing around the streets with all of this we fail to notice that our friend music is knocking on the door. Maybe one day we get lucky, we hear a knocking and we rush to the front door but we trip over all the garbage in the front room; all these clever little licks and 11/8 and 9/8 and 7/8 and all these fast little runs. So by the time we get to the door to open it our friend is gone...”
