Art & Creativity Quote by Roy Wood

Roy Wood’s line captures a very musicianly kind of chaos: the romance of live performance punctured by the dumb physics of outdoors. The phrasing is doing a lot of work. “Of course” pretends this is the natural order of things, as if wind sabotaging a set is just another predictable feature of the gig economy. That casual shrug is the joke: it takes what could be a career-anxiety nightmare (your sound literally scattering) and reframes it as a shared anecdote, the kind bands dine out on for decades.

The image is wonderfully elastic: “the music was flying around in mid air.” Music isn’t a thing you can see, so Wood leans into a cartoonish metaphor that makes the failure feel playful rather than humiliating. It also hints at a deeper truth about live music: it’s never fully under anyone’s control. In a studio, you pin sound down. Onstage, the environment becomes an uncredited bandmate with its own agenda.

Then comes the key social move: “You had to be there.” It’s a soft flex and a boundary. The story can’t be fully translated, which protects the magic and the mishap at once. Wood’s intent isn’t to complain; it’s to memorialize a moment when performance turns into improvisation, and professionalism means learning to “play off it” - not just the wind, but the audience’s attention, the venue’s limits, the night’s mood. “Quite funny” lands as British understatement: a way to admit it was ridiculous without sounding precious about the art.