Creativity Quote by Cilla Black

There’s a blunt, almost comic deflation in Cilla Black calling it “an unknown thing” and then dropping the clincher: “I like to be in control.” In one breath she captures the mood of a particular pop-cultural crossroads, when psychedelics were being sold as revelation and experienced, by plenty of ordinary people, as a roulette wheel. The phrase “very bad trips” isn’t poetic; it’s tabloid-plain, the language of cautionary tales swapping hands backstage. That plainness is the point. Black isn’t posturing as a counterculture mystic or a moral scold. She’s doing something more revealing: drawing a boundary.

The intent reads as self-protection, but also brand management. Black’s persona was built on warmth, polish, and professionalism - a working-class Liverpudlian who became a national fixture. Psychedelic abandon threatens that contract with the audience. “Unknown” signals risk, not romance; it frames drugs less as rebellion than as unreliable technology. And “control” isn’t just personal temperament. It’s a survival strategy for women in a male-run entertainment machine where losing composure could be weaponized against you.

Subtextually, she’s puncturing the era’s glamor around chemical liberation. For every mythic 60s narrative, there were artists who watched peers spiral, gigs collapse, careers get caricatured. Black’s line lands because it refuses the mythology and insists on a quieter ethic: competence over chaos, agency over adventure. It’s a pop star’s pragmatism, and it’s sharper than it first looks.