Creativity Quote by Bill Bruford

The sting here is in how casually Bruford drops the bomb. “Sometimes” understates a recurring ordeal; “had to” frames it as institutional fate, not a choice. Then he lands on the blunt verdict - “awful” - with the flatness of a tour diary entry that’s been rewritten in the mind a hundred times. For a musician known for precision and restraint, it’s a remarkably unornamented act of social percussion: one sharp hit, no flourish.

The context matters. Bruford comes from that particular British rock ecosystem where virtuosity and tight-laced professionalism often share a van with big personalities and fragile egos. Tony Kaye, the keyboardist associated with Yes, has long been cast in band lore as the less “progressive” member - more straight-ahead, more skeptical of excess. Rooming together becomes a microcosm of prog’s central tension: the obsessive craftsperson trapped in close quarters with someone whose habits, worldview, or social noise threatens the fragile concentration required to play music that’s basically calculus with amplifiers.

Subtextually, this isn’t really about beds or bathrooms. It’s about boundaries. Touring collapses privacy, and the roommate is the one person you can’t politely escape. Bruford’s line turns that claustrophobia into a tidy anecdote, the way band histories often launder genuine discomfort into a quotable fragment. The economy of the sentence is the point: a small complaint that hints at bigger frictions - taste, temperament, hierarchy - without litigating them, letting readers fill in the mess from the single word “awful.”