Wendy James Quotes

1. America as a whole is designed as a service industry. If I want to Fedex something at four in the morning I can. If I want to find a guitar string at five in the morning I can. It's just 24 hours a day there to give you what you need in order to work really hard. It's a worker's paradise.

2. If you don't watch out you get sucked into being "mortgaged for life". My radar, my antennae just aren't up for that kind of thing.

3. I've dabbled with the notion. I put my foot into drama school... but very quickly it became obvious to me that that was not the life for me. And really that consolidated the fact that it's music or nothing. There is no other option. Time spent on anything else could be time spent on music. It's my life. It's my passion. It's my sustenance. It's everything.

4. I like music because it makes sense of my whole reason to be alive.

5. Transvision Vamp, despite many people thinking it was just Wendy James, was a real gang. We were all in it together. It was a whole teenage ebullience thing. You believe in it because you believe in all your teenage reasons to be able to believe in anything. I now know how much hard toil and sweat I've put into it. I kept at it until I was satisfied. The short answer is there's a good reason to talk to journalists now. It's not for a peripheral reason, like: "I feel like doing an interview because I've not been talked about for a while."

6. I wake up in the morning glad I'm alive. Fatigue made me leave London. I'd walked down Portabello Road for 15 years and I was fed up with doing the same thing. I wanted to wake up and have a different vista. Some people move to Camden, I decided to move to New York. I always had that feeling when I came here: "Wouldn't it be great to live in New York." Then I thought to myself: "If you think it would be so great, just do it."

7. All the great bands have both attitude and ability. But I still believe that there aren't any rules about what's right and what's wrong, you can play a whole song on one chord as long as you make it interesting.

8. As for regrets, I don't regret anything. I have learned from certain experiences, but there is no point in regretting them. I am very excited about the future.

9. I am not out to seek approval.

10. At the end of the day, I don’t think that sex should be sold at all.

11. If somebody is sexy it’s inevitable that it will add to why that person is doing well, but I don’t think that sex should be sold in the same manner as saying:  "Hey, I look great, so pay me some money".

12. I just don't think there's any real basis on which you can just sell sex, unless you've got nothing else to sell… in which case you shouldn't be selling yourself anyway.

13. Well, a lot of the time last year, people were asking me to explain why I appeared the way I appeared, and now I think I’ve spent enough time explaining it and I’m not going to bother talking about it. Here I am - you know what Wendy James is about to a certain extent. You either like it or you don’t, take it or leave it. I’m not going to talk about it any more because I think I’ve done enough explaining. That’s it!

14. I just don’t want to be abused.

15. A lot of photographers, especially photographers that syndicate photographs throughout the whole world, they take advantage. They make loads and loads of money out of taking one crap shot as you’re walking out of a hotel - and that thing won’t happen! It's my life, my music, I look the way I look… and I welcome anyone that’s interested in me, it’s wonderful that people are interested - but I won’t have the piss taken out of me, not by anyone.

16. Transvision Vamp are so radically different to the Darling Buds and The Primitives. We don’t sound a thing like them and the only reason we got put in with them is because of my blonde hair, but it could have been anyone. I don’t care about things like that. It's got nothing to do with my music.

17. I didn't have any aspirations to be a rock singer at all. I used to go to gigs all the time but because I was never surrounded by the kind of people that wanted to form bands, it was never a feasible idea. I sung in lots of stage productions, but I spent all my time going to gigs. I never thought that the two would crossover.

18. The first few gigs were really frightening because I’d never done it before and Transvision Vamp is my first group but Nick and Tex and Dave had all had experience of other bands and they just said:"well let’s just go out there and enjoy ourselves for ourselves and not worry about whether the crowd like it, because if we're any good they will, and if we're not they'll let us know". That's just the only rule really - you can't tailor yourself to satisfy an audience, you have to do what you like and if they want to join in, they will.

19. Singing in a band was something that I had to learn to do really, because I was used to singing in big theatres in stage productions and that’s very different from being in a rock'n'roll band where you feed off other musicians.

20. The first tour was really brilliant. We were playing to between 300 and 600 each night, very small venues where everyone was just hot and sweaty and it was just brilliant fun because people used to climb in the van after the gig and come back to the hotel with us and just doss down there for the night. And consequently we've got a really hardcore of followers who have been there since the beginning, who we still recognize and they come up and say: "Hiya" and we all know each other. There's a really good community of Transvision Vamp followers, right from the early days.

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