Dave Stewart, of the Eurythmics, on finding your own voice:

But very shortly after that the trick is to find your own voice or your own style of playing, your own way of looking or being and not be scared to make that as extreme as possible. You know you can always reel it back in again if you’ve gone too far out there. But it’s like, flaunt your imperfections and you will be a star my dear. You know it’s… Anything about yourself that you feel uncomfortable with make it bigger. Like Mick Jagger would do with his lips or Marilyn Manson would do or Alice Cooper would do or, you know, all the characters that you would probably name that are very very very successful in music if you really looked at them they’re very extreme. Everything they’ve done has been very extreme. Whether it’s Kurt Cobain to Madonna to the Stones through to Prince, you know. All of them, you know. Eminem. Kanye West. And they’ve all sang about their real lives and sort of put themselves under a magnifying glass. When Doves Cry when Prince is singing about his mum and dad. Eminem, when he’s singing about his mum, you know. I mean they all just lay it all out on the line and they dress in a way and they perform in a way, they become – and why they become iconic is because all of the things that you would love to do and say and be multiplied times a thousand, so they become larger than life. So if you’re starting out as an artist and you really want to be an artist that becomes somebody who means something to a lot of people [...] its very very difficult to be that person if you just adopt a generic bland persona and use sort of bland, cliched lyrics to describe your emotions. You’ve really gotta go out there.

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