Creativity Quote by Roger Andrew Taylor

Casual to the point of comedy, Roger Taylor’s line has the offhand sting of someone narrating a minor workplace breakup inside a blockbuster career. “Some people” is the tell: it’s vague, distancing, a neat way to avoid naming names while still signaling that names matter. In Queen’s world, side projects weren’t hobbies; they were potential fractures in a band built on singular chemistry and constant negotiation.

The context is the mid-’80s moment when rock’s old model of the all-consuming band started competing with a new, celebrity-driven ecosystem. Duran Duran’s Power Station is the obvious reference point, a supergroup formed by members who stepped sideways into a shinier, more modular pop-industrial machine. Taylor’s phrasing treats that move like a shrug-worthy fact of life, but the subtext is about loyalty and creative gravity: when the main act is intense, any exit reads like a referendum.

What makes the quote work is its studied understatement. There’s no moralizing about ego or betrayal, just the dry, slightly British compression of a complicated dynamic into one bland sentence. That restraint is a kind of power move: it implies the speaker has seen enough departures and reunions to know that drama is cheap, and survival is the real flex.

It’s also a quiet reminder that bands are less like families than like long-running startups: people peel off, chase different thrills, then sometimes come back when they remember what only the original machine could produce.