Creativity Quote by Alexis Korner

Korner’s line lands like a wink from someone who knows the romance of artistry is mostly paperwork, late nights, and stubborn compulsion. “Compulsive musician” isn’t the polished myth of the inspired genius; it’s closer to a tic. He frames music as an addiction that chooses you, not a noble calling you serenely pursue. That honesty matters because Korner was a builder of scenes, not just a performer: a key catalyst in British blues, the kind of figure who mentored and connected others (the Stones, Clapton, the whole downstream ecosystem). Compulsion is what keeps that engine running when the glamour evaporates.

Then he spikes the piety: “a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.” The phrasing is quintessentially British and deliberately deflationary, puncturing the idea that musicians suffer for Art with a capital A. He’s admitting, with comic brutality, that music can function as a socially acceptable escape hatch - a way to dodge the normal scripts of steady jobs, predictable routines, and being legible to polite society. The subtext isn’t laziness; it’s resistance. In postwar Britain, especially for working and lower-middle-class kids, “anything else” often meant narrowing your life to what was practical. Blues offered an alternative identity: intense, messy, transatlantic, a little improper.

The intent is double: confess the obsession, then justify it. Korner makes the musician’s alibi sound like a joke, but it’s also a manifesto. If you can’t stop playing, you might as well let it save you from everything you’d regret becoming.