Life's Pleasures Quote by Bill Bruford

Bruford is doing something musicians of his era rarely do on the record: puncturing the romance of excess without pretending he was never part of it. The comic engine is in the sensory detail. “Scotch and coke” isn’t just alcohol; it’s a deliberately ugly image of rock-star appetite - expensive spirit drowned in sugar, taste flattened into pure effect. Calling it “ghastly sweet” smuggles in self-disgust, the kind that arrives only after you’ve had enough mornings to remember.

The pivot to “now” is the real move. He’s not moralizing at younger players so much as marking a cultural edit: the old mythology of the hard-drinking genius has lost its glamour, replaced by a quieter awareness of cost. “For good reason” lands like a parenthetical, but it carries the weight of bodies, careers, and relationships that didn’t survive the joke. It’s restraint presented as knowledge, not virtue.

Then comes the soft, communal phrasing: “We’re all a little wiser.” Bruford avoids heroic redemption; “a little” keeps it modest, almost reluctant. He’s talking about an industry that once treated self-destruction as stagecraft, and a generation that’s aging into candor. The subtext is that wisdom isn’t enlightenment, it’s damage converted into policy: fewer drinks, more control, less myth. In a genre built on bravado, that understatement is its own kind of rebellion.