Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's Peter Hayes has been dissing reading and learning and all that kind of nonsense. Well, to a point anyway. He was talking to Gigwise about the previously reported Oasis / Bloc Party feuding, and in particular Noel Gallagher's dismissal of the Party as "a band off university challenge". Hayes seemed to suggest that he too thought being too learned a band wasn't a good thing.
He told the music website: "Life's nothing to do with reading, it has to do with spirit. I couldn't give a fuck about reading. I don't read that much, and I couldn't much care to read [Jack Kerouac's] 'On The Road'. I tried, I couldn't, I'd rather live it, you know what I mean? I never went to college, it might have been stupid but I'd rather live all those experiences that the college kids are reading about. So no it isn't cool to be clever, not really because you're not fucking living. Get out and get your fuckin nose out of a book and live life". Though, he did qualify those sentiments slightly by adding: "At the same time I say it ain't cool to be a dumbass either, I have a bit of class you know. It ain't cool to be useless, I mean that's everywhere, being useless is not clever", so that's good to know.
Just for the record, we checked and it turns out life is a bit to do with reading, and that many of the coolest people in the world are actually very clever. But to be fair to Hayes, it would be unfair to expect him to know that fact, given that we got it out of a book. Yeah, we read it. Radical.