Creativity Quote by Edwin Starr

There is a hustler’s pride tucked into Edwin Starr’s plainspoken claim, and it lands because it reframes “work” as both labor and belonging. Starr wasn’t just touring; he was testifying to where his career actually paid off. For an American soul singer best known globally for the anti-war thunderbolt “War,” Britain became less a stopover than a reliable engine room: steady bookings, receptive audiences, and a live circuit that often treated veteran Black American performers with a kind of institutional respect the U.S. industry could be stingier about once the hits cooled.

The intent is practical - a statement about schedules and demand - but the subtext is sharper. He’s quietly admitting that success is geographic, and that fame can be lopsided: iconic in the culture, under-leveraged at home. “Anywhere else in the world” is the tell; it’s not boasting about global conquest, it’s acknowledging an uneven marketplace where the place that listens hardest isn’t necessarily the place you’re from.

It also hints at the late-20th-century pattern of American R&B and soul artists finding second (or longer) lives in the UK and Europe, where nostalgia didn’t always mean irrelevance and where live performance remained a serious economy. The line works because it’s both modest and revealing: no myth-making, just the unromantic truth that artistry often survives on logistics - flights, venues, promoters - and on the audiences that keep showing up.