Time & Perspective Quote by Gordon Waller

“It was a great time to be making music because everything else was changing” frames music less as a product of genius than as a live wire plugged into a shifting wall socket. Gordon Waller isn’t romanticizing the artist’s solitude; he’s describing a rare alignment between cultural turbulence and creative permission. When “everything else” is in flux - politics, fashion, technology, sexual norms, the very idea of youth - music stops being background and becomes a kind of social operating system. The good time isn’t just about better gigs or bigger audiences. It’s about the rules loosening.

The sentence works because of its sly causality: not despite chaos, but because of it. Change becomes an accelerant, creating demand for new sounds that can keep up with a world shedding old identities. Subtext: stability favors tradition, and tradition polices taste. Instability, by contrast, invites risk; it makes listeners receptive to experiments, hybrids, noise, attitude. For a working musician, that receptivity is oxygen.

Waller’s era - postwar Britain sliding into the 1960s - is a textbook case. A generation with disposable income and distrust of inherited authority was building its own language, and pop became the fastest dialect. Recording tech and broadcast media widened the pipeline, while transatlantic influences made “local” feel obsolete. His line also carries a mild, knowing humility: artists didn’t single-handedly cause the cultural quake, but they were lucky enough to surf it. Music mattered because the world was already ready to be remade.