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Creativity Quote by Georgie Fame

"We were at Pye Studios for half an hour so we set the gear up and we did two tracks. A month later we found out it was selling thirty thousand copies a day"

About this Quote

There is a delicious whiplash in Georgie Fame's recollection: the casual mechanics of making music slammed up against the absurd speed of the market. "Half an hour" and "two tracks" read like a shrug, almost a joke about how unglamorous creation can be when you're working musicians grabbing studio time. Then comes the punchline that isn't a punchline: "thirty thousand copies a day". The sentence turns on that delayed revelation, a month-long gap that makes success feel less like a planned ascent and more like weather.

The intent is partly to demythologize pop stardom. Fame isn't selling a heroic origin story of painstaking genius; he's underlining the randomness and velocity of the 60s recording economy, when studios like Pye functioned as hit factories and distribution could turn a modest session into a national event overnight. The subtext is working-class pragmatism: set the gear up, cut the tracks, move on. Art happens in the margins of schedules.

It also hints at a specific kind of disorientation. Finding out later that something is "selling" at that scale suggests distance from the machinery of fame, as if the music has already left the room and started living a separate life. The line captures a cultural moment when pop stopped being local and became industrial, and when musicians could still be surprised by the size of the wave they were riding.

Quote Details

TopicMusic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Fame, Georgie. (2026, January 15). We were at Pye Studios for half an hour so we set the gear up and we did two tracks. A month later we found out it was selling thirty thousand copies a day. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-were-at-pye-studios-for-half-an-hour-so-we-set-162121/

Chicago Style
Fame, Georgie. "We were at Pye Studios for half an hour so we set the gear up and we did two tracks. A month later we found out it was selling thirty thousand copies a day." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-were-at-pye-studios-for-half-an-hour-so-we-set-162121/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We were at Pye Studios for half an hour so we set the gear up and we did two tracks. A month later we found out it was selling thirty thousand copies a day." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-were-at-pye-studios-for-half-an-hour-so-we-set-162121/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Georgie Fame (born June 26, 1943) is a Musician from United Kingdom.

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