Parenting & Family Quote by Alexis Korner

There is a musician's version of exile, and Alexis Korner draws the border with a single, dismissive credential: children. "Once you became associated with a children's show, you're finished" isn't just snobbery; it's a warning about how fame calcifies into a brand, and how quickly that brand can stop being yours.

Korner came up in a world where credibility was currency: British blues fighting for seriousness in a culture that still treated pop as disposable. A children's show reads, in that ecosystem, like surrendering the keys to your mystique. The subtext is less "kids are bad" than "adults will never hear you the same way again". You're no longer the artist with a dangerous edge or hard-earned authenticity; you're the safe face in the living room at 4 p.m., the soundtrack to snack time. That kind of association is sticky, and Korner understands the cruelty of public memory: it prefers the simplest label, the easiest anecdote, the most marketable version of you.

There's also a quiet class anxiety here. Children's TV in mid-century Britain often meant institutional gatekeepers, regulated content, and a sanitized performance style. For a blues musician - a genre built on grit, adult longing, and transgression - the fear isn't that the work gets worse, it's that the audience's imagination gets smaller.

The line lands because it's brutally pragmatic. Korner isn't moralizing; he's describing a cultural machine that turns nuance into a mascot costume, then asks you to wear it forever.