• VV: It was more like, when we started playing with each other, we just wanted to make our own histories and start over.
• Hotel: There was not much thought put into it. It just seemed like we wanted to set a bit of a ground-zero. So we renamed ourselves, and it's kind of sweet and fun. I guess, in retrospect, you could try and analyze it and find something deep in it, but there isn't anything like that. There was no puffed-up stance on it - we were just sitting in our bedroom with no money and eating bread, and thought it'd be cool.
• VV: It's been really funny with some people in America, because they've been more simple, like, 'You're called Hotel?! As in a place to stay?!'
• Interviewer: Well, Alison's hardly a name to shy away from, surely..?
• VV: 'Yeah,' she grimaces, 'but I've had it forever... It's getting old now.'

❝I think there’s gotta be a band that comes along now that makes everything around seem irrelevant, makes all the major things - the money, the way it’s all sewn up with finance - someone’s gotta come along and blow it all out of the water like punk did and say, ‘That’s irrelevant - you don’t need anything, maybe $40, and a heart of gold.’ I want to be that band. I’m not saying we can be, and we might not get there, but I’m gonna try to stick to that. We’d like to fuck everything up the way it is, and just reinvent it. Create history and go against all the advice you’re getting all the time - and instead going after what you feel. I think it can be taken a long way. It’s really hard, there will be rocky times and low points. But like everything we’ve been through, there’s always been really tough moments, regardless. Every day there’s something there to challenge you.❞ -vv & hotel, london 2002

• FW: Your voice often sounds a lot like PJ Harvey, which is wonderful. She’s one of my favorites. Are you a fan of her? Is there anyone you don’t like to be compared to?.
• Alison: PJ Harvey is amazing and so is Patti Smith. If anyone said that I sound like Patti Smith, I would die because I think she’s incredible. I’d like to think that I could stand apart, like any band wants to.
• Jamie: I think it’s always easier getting compared to bands that are way in the past than it is getting compared to bands that are around now.
• Alison: Right, because people will say “You’re the new PJ Harvey” but she’s still alive. So I can’t be.
• Jamie: PJ Harvey is one of the reasons I ruined my life with music. When I heard the first PJ Harvey record I knew that’s what I wanted to do. She turned me on to a lot of music I listen to now. Listening to her made me listen to [Captain] Beefheart, which made me listen to Howlin’ Wolf, and then back to Charlie Patton. Then she brought out “To Bring You My Love” and I thought “What the fuck? This is unbelievable.” It made me interested in Suicide.

• Hotel: There’s a White Stripes song that’s only drums and singing…
• VV: ‘It’s one of their best songs as well…
• Hotel: And it’s fucking brilliant. It’s only twenty seconds long, and it’s about how you’re in your little room and you write some songs and how it’s really great, and then you do quite well, and then you might need a bigger room, and so you go there and you’re in this bigger, posher room - but you can’t get the same inspiration as before… So you have to sit down and try to remember what it was like to be in your little room! And that just says it all.’