Creativity Quote by Ivor Novello

There’s a sly shrug baked into Novello’s line: of course the crowd is easy to influence, because the crowd is the point. He isn’t diagnosing individual gullibility so much as naming a social physics: once people are bundled into a mass, the pressure to sync up becomes its own force. The crowd doesn’t need a sophisticated argument; it needs a cue. A chorus, a headline, a chant, a sudden hush. The mechanism is imitation disguised as certainty.

Coming from a musician who lived on the other side of the footlights, the quote reads less like elitist scolding and more like backstage realism. Novello wrote for stages and screens when modern celebrity and mass entertainment were hardening into an industry. He knew how quickly emotion can be engineered: a modulation that signals triumph, a lyric that offers shared heartbreak, a star’s entrance timed to trigger applause. The subtext is uncomfortable for artists and audiences alike: the same collective energy that feels like communion can also be a lever.

“Largely because it is a crowd” is the knife twist. It implies the vulnerability isn’t a defect in the people present; it’s structural. An individual might be skeptical, complicated, even contrary. Add bodies, add anonymity, and skepticism becomes socially expensive. In that sense, Novello’s observation lands beyond concert halls: politics, advertising, moral panics. The crowd is influence-ready because belonging is a drug, and the dose gets stronger the more people take it together.