Top 60 Johnny Flynn Quotes

If you’re trying to do something wholly new, it’s hard to fully trust it. But if you use forms that have come before, it lends your music weight and authority. It’s also a way to acknowledge that it’s not just you who’s feeling these things. The emotions are coming through you from a whole history.

I fell in love with the legend of Paul Robeson as a kid. My dad would tell me all these amazing stories about his life and, bizarrely, ended up singing to Robeson on his deathbed.

I’m a huge David Hockney fan.

I think the two are kind of synonymous for me; songwriting is like my form of diary making. It’s how I process the world. Without doing that, I feel kind of lost. The characters that I play often come out in the songs and the challenges that they face, albeit in an abstract way.

It’s not in the mainstream media, but across towns, it is amazing how there are small groups of people getting together and forming artistic collectives – they may not be being overtly political, but I’d say by channelling their energy into community projects, that’s a valid political statement.

Not listening is the reason for so many misunderstandings and conflicts.

I had to learn how to work in a studio at first because it’s a totally different creative environment to the ‘bedroom recordings’ I’d done before, where I could translate my own ideas without having to explain them to anyone.

My guitar is a 1934 National Trojan. They call it a resonator, which is the guitar guys played in the honky-tonks before amplification. It’s very loud. It’s the type of guitar that Son House and Robert Johnson played.

The moment you have children, it’s like your heart gets out of your body, puts on clothes, and walks away.

Loads of verses don’t make it into the finished song.

My dad was an actor, and he made it all seem quite magical. It felt like a slightly subversive thing, telling stories, when all of my other friends’ parents were builders or bank clerks. It’s always seemed quite magical to me.

Certain films should only be watched at 40,000 feet. Like, certain comedies and certain, uh, emotionally charged movies.

As a jobbing actor or musician, you have to take any work you can get.

I first came across Langhorne Slim when I saw him play live, and he’s an incredibly infectious performer. The way he works the crowd is mind-blowing. You can listen to his music without really listening to his lyrics, but it pays off if you do.

There’s something amazing about ‘Fawlty Towers’ and ‘The Office’ only being two series. I think, when you really nail it, you don’t need to do more than two or three.

I like really bad puns – proper, red-top, nasty puns – I find them funny.

I played trumpet for Noah and the Whale a couple of times.

It’s great being an actor and being part of a play or a film where there’s usually quite a big group of people who are collaborating, and your job is really to fit in and share that energy. With music, because I write the songs, it’s a broader, more abstract process.

I guess I started writing poetry and stuff and then decided to set it to music.

My dad was working class.

I definitely asked too many questions of my teachers and was probably a bit facetious at times.

What’s quite nice about this whole folk movement is that it’s born out of genuine friendship. And nobody’s infringing on anybody’s space.

I’ve never done anything like ‘Brotherhood’ before. It was a great challenge to take up a part in a live audience sitcom – it was amazing.

We had no money, my dad was out of work a lot, and we never owned a house. It was very hand-to-mouth.

My only incentive is to write music that changes me, where the process of making it is a discovery and is true in some way, at that moment.

I can’t remember a ‘best gig,’ and my brain doesn’t work in absolute terms like that.

I really love a lot of early Sixties R&B, rock n’ roll, and I love performing songs that have that power and soulfulness.

When I first moved to London, there was talk of a folk revival, with annoying names like nu-folk that made me feel slightly ill.

I’m a big Bob Dylan fan. I’m also a blues geek.

I try and stay in my right brain as much as I can, but my left takes over.

Westminster politics is very unattractive, and people are channelling political energy into more inward questioning – there are a lot of musicians whose songs are all about feeling, and it’s almost like that’s the only safe place to express yourself.

I always love going to New York.

If you’re in a garage band, it’s about being better than the band in the next-door garage. But in the folk tradition, it’s more a vibe of sharing.

The truth is there’s always a hum of people playing folk music in cities.

Taking someone else’s language and fitting it into your own speech – you learn a lot about other people’s brains, doing that.

Diane Cluck is part of the anti-folk movement in New York. She’s got a really haunting voice, and she usually sings in the pentatonic scale.

A lot of the work I’ve done has involved playing quite sympathetic characters.

I’ve been cast in a lot of comedies. I’ve done things like multi-cam sitcoms: you know, ‘Seinfeld’ type… not as good as ‘Seinfeld,’ but that kind of thing. I love that stuff.

I’m not that politically educated.

All the adults in my family were actors, so there wasn’t much else in terms of role models. I fell in love with that world, being backstage at the theatre.

I feel really lucky that I somehow have blagged my way into loads of different experiences. I find making a film fascinating, I find making a play amazing, and working with my band and scoring things… it’s all really cool. I’m just a glutton for experience, really.

In my early twenties, the whole experience of going on tour was like losing myself in this slightly wild environment.

I did a lot of theater as a young actor in my early twenties, and my first few records really came from writing songs through the rehearsal processes.

I think everyone in their 30s looks back at their 20s and thinks, ‘Oh God, if I’d just done this and this, and not done that.’

The pop industry is so well-practised at channelling young people’s creative energy that I think it gets abused.

Folk music – and what people are now perceiving as being folk music – is music that’s quite close to the ground. The songs sound quite old, even if they’re new. They sound like they’ve been sung by different people for years.

I just said, casually, ‘You know, I passed up on auditioning for Einstein.’ And my friend was like, ‘You idiot, you have to do it!’ She made me do it. I sent the tapes off assuming that somebody would say, ‘Ha ha, very funny.’

My dad was an actor, and he always said that work was work; you can’t turn your nose up at it. We didn’t have much money when I was growing up, and he had this real work ethic, which I inherited.

When I was young, I was being pushed, against my will, towards becoming a classical musician. I had music scholarships; I had to play the violin and do orchestra practice and that sort of stuff. That meant I didn’t get to do any school plays. I desperately wanted to do that.

In my mind, there’s usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don’t want to enforce that on other people. I think that’s why I like using metaphor so much.

I like the idea of letting the music do its own work and the stories being more expressionful – if that’s a word – in people’s imagination. I’ve just got a thing about people and songs telling you how you should feel.

I’m often the one in my gang of friends who’s worried about how we’re going to get from A to B. I’m the one running around saying, ‘Is somebody going to do something about it?’ Everyone else is bit more chilled.

I don’t really write songs. They’re just there anyway, chiseling away at the atmosphere, and suddenly they’re like, ‘Oh, thanks for coming. Thanks for finding me. We’ll share each other now.’

I take them both seriously – I don’t particularly want to be an ‘actor-musician.’ I want to play the great challenging parts, to be right for the part, rather than just, ‘Oh, he can play the fiddle.’

I sometimes self-edit when it comes to auditions and go, ‘They’re not going to cast me, so I’m not going to do it.’

I imagine that, for most people, acting isn’t something they think is a viable option, whereas for me, it was the most viable option. No adults around me knew how to do anything else.

I like getting older. I always looked younger than I was, and I found that people wouldn’t give me the room to speak. The older I get, it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m still talking, and they’re still listening.’

I’m not really interested in myself in my writing. I can’t see myself in the songs, even though I know different parts of me are there.

The world that I know and the world that I come from is from the arts, and my wife’s an artist, and I’ve been a musician since I left college, and there’s tons of musicians I’d love to play.

I had a series of jobs in the small fishing village in West Wales where my family lived when I was a teenager. I worked as a fisherman in the day, and then the skipper and his wife ran a small restaurant – she’d cook the fish he caught.