The question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Ever since I saw The Beatles in 1962-63 I started to dream about being in a group. Being on stage, in a group, writing your own songs, it just seemed like they were having a ton amount of fun and there was this huge music explosion.
Sally Steele, Vegas Rocks Magazine, 6 April 2020 source ↗
Not a child, which was short-sighted of me.
When I was growing up I wanted to be a minister. I wanted to preach.
I had no idea whatsoever, and nor did anyone else. I thought I’d go to art school and see whether I liked it – and of course I did, and stayed.
When I was a child, it was a bus driver or engine driver; then, when I was a teenager, I went to the theatre and wanted to be an actor.
I have no real qualms with this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class, except, damn, Billy Idol should have made it.
I was trying to put a sexy element into punk because that’s one thing that was missing from it.
I was trying to put a sexy element into punk because that’s one thing that was missing from it.
Yeah, well, he died of too much of all the right things.
I’m the sexy sexagenarian. Then I’m gonna be the sexy septuagenarian, ha ha!
I nearly lost my leg and things like that, my life and my leg, you know? So (laughter) yeah, so gradually through the '90s, early 2000s, I was gradually trying to get off drugs, really. That's what I was doing, you know? I'm glad I'm like this today because I wouldn't be here talking to you. I would be probably either dead, in prison or gone crazy.
Rick Astley, Jo Nesbø, Shirley Manson, Julie Andrews, Bobby Womack, Father John Misty
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