Life's Pleasures Quote by Bill Bruford

Bruford’s line lands with the bluntness of a drummer counting off: no poetry, no apology, just a flat admission that carries its own backbeat of consequence. “We used to” does the heavy lifting. It’s a neat little time machine that signals distance, survival, and a quietly drawn boundary between then and now. He doesn’t say “we drank,” present tense; he doesn’t say “I,” either. The plural spreads the weight across a scene, a band culture, an era when excess wasn’t just tolerated but practically filed under “job description.”

The phrase “an awful lot” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s casual British understatement, a shrug you can hear. Underneath it’s a moral adjective smuggled in as a quantifier: awful as in huge, but also awful as in not great, not harmless. That’s the subtext of a musician looking back on the machinery of touring and recording: adrenaline, late nights, pressure, and the social glue of drinking as the easiest form of bonding and decompression.

Context matters because Bruford comes from progressive rock’s high-wire years, where virtuosity and chaos often traveled together. The quote reads like someone protecting the romance of the story while refusing to glamorize the damage. It’s not a confessional designed for redemption points; it’s a terse cultural timestamp. The restraint is the tell: when a veteran says it that plainly, you’re meant to hear everything he’s choosing not to narrate.