Time & Perspective Quote by Jamie Muir

It reads like a shrug, but the shrug is the point. Jamie Muir frames what could have been a career-defining origin story as half-economic necessity, half accident: "not much work around", "a bit in Germany or something", "somehow". In rock mythology, the band formation is usually a clean narrative of destiny or genius. Muir punctures that on purpose, replacing fate with a fog of gigs, geography, and imperfect memory.

The casual imprecision does two things. First, it restores the working-musician reality that glossy retrospectives erase: people don t assemble because the muse strikes; they assemble because rent is due and someone has a lead. "Germany or something" evokes the well-worn circuit where British players learned professionalism the hard way, in clubs that didn t care about your future legend. That context matters for Muir, whose percussion work is often described as radical or otherworldly; he quietly roots it in labor, not mysticism.

Second, the line performs an anti-ego stance. "I can t remember exactly how" isn t just forgetfulness, it s a refusal to over-author the past. Laurie Baker "got involved" rather than being recruited, implying that creative communities form through proximity and happenstance. The subtext is democratic: the music emerges from collisions, not masterminds. Coming from a figure associated with experimental intensity, the tone is almost mischievous. It suggests that even the strangest sounds can start with the most ordinary sentence: there wasn t much work, so we played.