Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

There is a quiet stubbornness in Jenkinson's shrug of a sentence: the moment where collaboration stops being romantic and starts being an obstacle. "I couldn't find a group" reads less like complaint than diagnosis. The scene is familiar to anyone who has tried to make something weird, precise, or ahead of the room: you can be surrounded by talented people and still feel artistically alone. The key phrase is "what I wanted to do" - not "what we wanted", not "what sounded good", but a singular internal spec no committee can satisfy.

The subtext is about taste as discipline. "No one was really up for it" sounds casual, but it implies risk: the idea was demanding, maybe technically punishing, maybe socially uncool. In electronic music culture, where gear and genre can become a kind of group identity, refusing the available lanes can be isolating. Jenkinson (best known as Squarepusher) came up in a UK landscape where scenes were strong and expectations were legible: drum'n'bass, IDM, jazz-fusion crossovers, club functionalism. His work often sits at the friction points between those worlds, which makes the search for like-minded bandmates less like networking and more like hunting for rare compatibility.

It also explains the logic of the solo auteur in electronic music: when the sound in your head is too specific, the studio becomes your band. The quote isn't self-mythologizing; it's a practical origin story for why some artists end up building their own universe rather than joining someone else's.