PROG AWARDS 2012

Rick Wakeman, Genesis, Steven Wilson, Rush and Anathema were among the winners at the first Progressive Music Awards, held tonight in Kew Gardens.

Some of the biggest names in prog turned up for the event, including Genesis, Asia, ELP, The Moody Blues, Roxy Music, Marillion, Steve Hackett, Fish, It Bites and Anathema.

The event was hosted by Gavin Esler of Newsnight. It’s the first time that the genre has been celebrated in such a fashion. As Wakeman himself said: “It’s about time prog got the respect it deserves for the way it’s created, and continues to create, some of the most important music around”.

The winners are:

NEW BLOOD: TesseracT

LIVE EVENT: Anathema

GRAND DESIGN: Pink Floyd Immersion reissues

ANTHEM: Squackett A Life Within A Day

ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Rush Clockwork Angels

VISIONARY: Peter Hammill

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Genesis

VIRTUOSO: Carl Palmer

GUIDING LIGHT: Steven Wilson

PROG GOD: Rick Wakeman

http://www.progrockmag.com/news/prog-awards-the-winners/

PINK FLOYD DRUMMER AT OLYMPICS CLOSING

I have been resisting the temptation to do any Olympic-themed postings over the last few weeks. This is partly because I find the excess of the whole thing expensive, and the fact that in a country where people are having their Disability Benefits slashed we can spend £27 million on the opening ceremony alone is highly distasteful and smacks of bread and circuses. However, there are some interesting proggy themed links to the whole affair, and now it is all over I feel happier about writing about it.

Pink Floyd's drummer Nick Mason performed Wish You Were Here at the Olympics Closing Ceremony with pop star Ed Sheeran. Although there was no appearance from David Gilmour or Roger Waters, the "Burning Man" was recreated from the Wish You Were Here album cover and the band were made complete by Mike Rutherford from Genesis and Richard Jones from The Feeling.

Many thanks to those jolly nice chaps at Neptune Pink Floyd for the picture and link:

Read on...

HEY REYNARD... SUPPER'S READY

Someone sent me this the other day, and I thought it was delightful. However, believe it or not, I have sent it to various friends and relations, some of whom didn't get it at all.

I wonder whether this could be the beginning of a series. Could we have a speciman of Salmo trutta holding a copy of Trout Mask Replica (the fish that was actually on the cover was a cyprinid of some sort). Could we have an aquiliform holding a copy of Steve Miller's Fly like an eagle or even a brown rat holding a copy of the eponymous debut album by The Stranglers?

You see where I'm going with this..

EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Phillips interview (Part Two)

As I said yesterday, one of the most eagerly awaited releases from Gonzo this spring is a double CD from Anthony Phillips and Andrew Skeet. The album - which is called Seventh Heaven - contains some of the lushest and most beautiful music that I have heard for a long time.

On Monday I interviewed Anthony about the new album. The first part of the interview went up yesterday. We continue talking about the opera singer whose extraordinary voice is showcased on the album...

Jon: Now Lucy Crowe – what a voice

Anthony: Yes, we got her originally through a fixer friend called Dominic Kelly, and she is with a very big agency but we got her for considerably less than we would have done through the big agency. She’s a lovely lady and she’s also very approachable – she’s not a kind of diva, she’s a brilliant opera singer, but she likes singing other stuff as well so she’s quite an all-rounder.

She literally just came in and just did the track for us. It’s about the only time the next neighbours have said to me.... 'oh I really liked what you were doing'. We we actually recorded her in a downstairs non-soundproofed room to try and get a bit of ambience, and so they could hear her, but they couldn’t hear the music because it was obviously on headphones, and they were saying, gosh that singer was very good.

It’s about the only compliment I’ve ever had from them actually.... but she was absolutely delightful. But I haven’t seen her since, because almost immediately afterwards she went off to have a baby and I think it is probably now...the baby was born around Christmas... so I would think she would be starting to perform again soon. Yes, a lovely, lovely voice and obviously been very successful and we were very, very lucky to get her. We hope to do some more stuff with her clearly.

Jon: The thing that I thought was the most striking about the whole album. You were talking earlier about how the computer age has changed everything for everybody, and everybody I speak to - without any exception - for the Gonzo blog says that. Its changed for writers too: I’m writing things that instead of going through the three month editorial process, are now up being read three or four hours after I’ve written them, which I think is exciting. I like being able to do that.

But working with a real orchestra and going all the way to Prague – it’s an oddly old-fashioned, but rather satisfying way of doing it. That’s really rather nice.

Anthony: It is in a way, although I don’t think the analogy quite holds up, I know what you saying about the whole process. Because obviously all the major, major scores for films are still recorded in a studio with real players. Now I know where we are heading here, with samples are getting more and more sophisticated and soon you possibly won’t not need players etc.. This has been said, but it’s going to take many, many more years before you are going to be able to actually imitate the multitudinous nuances of all the different instruments and the inter-play between them, to replace that, so I think whilst a lot of studios have lost ground for the intermediate stuff - as you rightly say, the computer stuff, a lot of the rock music and stuff.

I think for classical music, and for orchestral scores, I think the old studio – the conventional studio – with bits of orchestra is very much still here to stay for a while.

Jon: Which is a good thing, I think

Anthony: Which is a great thing, and also keeps people in work as well. There is just something about hearing players; it’s that humanity, it’s that inter-relation between all those people that is so exciting. You won’t get I mean if you work at home and just build it up layer by layer.

Jon: No that is something that Pro-tools just doesn’t give you.

Anthony: Well that’s quite right. Yes, I’m learning how to edit that at the moment, having a battle with it, but I’m getting there.

Jon: Well the bits I have heard of the new album, I think are absolutely wonderful

Anthony: Thank you very much indeed

Jon: And I’m very much looking forward to Anne-Marie at Gonzo getting the copies in, in a couple of weeks time of the complete thing so I can blag one of her then I would like at some point to go through some of the tracks in more detail

Anthony: Please do. The good news is that it has already been picked up and scheduled on Classic FM, which we are very lucky about. Diane Hinds who Rob found me. She badgered them and they are going to profile it as the Featured CD on Drive with John Brunning w/c 7th May. This means the album will get a daily play at around 6.15pm, every day that week. It will also be played on several other shows across the station in the coming weeks.

We chatted for a few more minutes about this and that, and particularly about my late father who loved Classic FM, and then we said our farewells and put the 'phones down. What a nice chap he is. I am very much looking forward to our next chat..

Check out the Gonzo page for his new album

EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Phillips interview (Part One)

One of the most eagerly awaited releases from Gonzo this spring is a double CD from Anthony Phillips and Andrew Skeet. The album - which is called Seventh Heaven - contains some of the lushest and most beautiful music that I have heard for a long time.

Anthony Phillips is - of course - best known for being one of the founder members of Genesis, and Andrew Skeet is known for his orchestrations for many bands including Suede who are one of my favourite bands of all time. So, what do they sound like together? The answer is remarkable.

Anthony seems to be a genuinely nice chap. He seemes genuinely interested in my day job, and we talked about Charles Fort, Leonardo da Vinci, and other esoteric subjects (as one does) before we got stuck in to talking about the new album:

Jon: The weird thing is talking about an album, which I have only heard bits of. But the thing that I thought was very interesting, was that I was reading the write up about you and your collaborator on your website; I wondered, how does it work? Does one of you think of a tune, and the other think `I’ll go and orchestrate it`?

Anthony: Without wishing to be terribly boring, the genus of this really was that I was commissioned to write what they used to call a library music album. They now call it 'production music' because it has gone much more upmarket. But it is basically stock music for TV and film, where they haven’t got time, or haven’t got budgets, or whatever, to commission composers. Of course, the other thing nowadays, is the editors love it because they don’t have to worry about composers straight up; they just take the music down from the shelf and of course with the sophisticated modern editing they can chop all these pieces of music around without some composer standing over their shoulder and saying ‘sorry mate, you can’t do that’.

They can create a kind of collage, they can create their own score you see from available pieces of music so computer technology has changed a great deal and I was asked to do one of these production albums and I was given pretty a much a free hand. I was told to sort of do anything that is very filmic and descriptive. I studied music after leaving Genesis and I can arrange, but I don’t have the really wide range of arranging abilities across all sorts of different genres that Andrew Skeet has.

I didn’t know Andrew Skeet; effectively he came in purely as arranger but I felt that his contribution to those original pieces was greater than just arranging. This is an old chestnut this one, you get some composers who are very mean and even if a bloke transforms a track completely they won’t cut him in on the publishing. And there are some numerous stories, and we won’t mention any names, but it does come a time where you have got to look back and say, hang on, my piece was basic and this guy has absolutely transformed it, therefore this is not just arranging, in the public’s mind they are hearing something which is completely transformed. So I sort of cut Andrew in on that a certain amount and we enjoyed working on it so much that we then did really a couple of other projects off our own bat, one where he put strings on some guitar music of mine, and we got on so well that we decided to take the best of all these different sessions where we’d moved from just strictly speaking arranger and composer, to co-composers, and we have included them all on this double album.

Jon: So what sort of time period were they written over?

Anthony: It was really written over 2008 and 2011 – there is the odd bit that comes from earlier. Like every composer you’ve got little ideas from the past like ....sketchbooks of stuff don’t you, so I suppose the earliest musical idea, (actually I think there is one from back in the mid-90s) but most of them would be in the last two or three years. And for me it was just one of the most exciting things because, you know, you write a piece on piano, you sketch a few things out, but there is something about when the baton goes up and if you’ve got a good arranger, just how sumptuous it sounds.

The great thing about Andrew is he doesn’t over-schmaltz it. Some arrangers over-schmaltz it and he doesn’t – it’s emotional but he stays just on the right side of it. And then we have actually co-composed a couple of things which is, to go back to your original question, where I suppose it’s like back to the Genesis days where somebody would write what we called a bit and it would be, ‘ I’ve got this bit and you’ve got that bit to add on’, and this sort of Sellotaping goes on.

For instance the opening track ‘Credo in Cantus’ was very much my tune to start with, but then the glorious middle section, which is a lot better than my middle section, is Andrew’s. So actually that worked really well. I just threw the initial idea at him, and he just developed the middle, and then came back to my section and the end. So I’ve been very, very lucky to meet somebody with whom I am so sympatico, and who is so clever.

Jon: I tell you the thing that struck me, and I don’t know if this is me being objective, or just where my head was while I was listening, but several of them sounded like religious music

Anthony: That’s interesting.

Jon: They sounded like 19th Century hymns

Anthony: That’s interesting because Genesis were famously, in the early days, influenced by the English Chorus tradition. We loved some of the hymns at Charterhouse, and the first Genesis album had hymns as links, so I think I’ve always probably retained, without being an overtly religious person, that love of church music. At times it has worried me, because people have said 'oh gosh this sounds like something you should hear in church, and I’ve thought I have strayed too far down that line, but it is not something I would deny that there is that something in the musical generic makeup, but you are actually the first person to say it, so I’m hoping that it’s not too much that way.

Jon: I think it’s a good thing, personally. It is one of the things that really irritates me about the Church of England is the way they’ve got rid of some of those glorious old hymn tunes and replaced them with facile pop music.

Anthony: Herbert Howells, to name but one, was somebody that we absolutely loved, and some of his hymns are absolutely glorious. Yes, I shall take the compliment in the right way, so thank you.

Jon: My favourite track, by the way, of the ones I have heard so far is ‘Shipwreck of St Paul’. That is bloody amazing.

Anthony: That is really kind of you. There is an interesting story there, actually because if you read the blurb the library company very kindly – the production company, well the great Universal publishers, put up the money to record the stuff in Prague and we went out there.

There was a mixture of some terrific players – how can I put this – excellent individual players, but man for man probably not quite as good as some of the crack London session players who are used to simply getting the most difficult stuff chucked at them every day, and we found that with that one that the Philip’s, I suppose I can’t pretend that I am incredibly influenced by Philip Glass but I respect him, but there are a lot of other composers that I like more. But there's a Philip Glass-type figure and those kind of arpeggios are on strings maybe partly because I didn’t write them terribly well, but I think the London players are more used to that than the Prague players and we did have trouble.

I mean it’s a very difficult piece, so we re-did that one at Abbey Road. We re-did about five at Abbey Road before Christmas, which I funded, the ones that had been particularly difficult in Prague and it really did come up trumps, and I mean Andrew re-scored it and I’m so glad you liked that because – if you had heard the original version – it isn’t great to be honest, and I’m so glad we re-did it. And incidentally, I don’t know if you know this, but I must come clean on this, but I got the title, I was just looking through my diary of Saints’ days and national holidays in different countries and it seems to be that some of them have All Saints Day, and there are various others, but actually in Malta there is a Saint’s day – the Shipwreck of St Paul – around the time of late February and I was so taken by the title that I used it.

Jon: I didn’t know that.

That was the track that stuck out, and remember that was hearing it over the computer, because I got that from your website. I think its absolutely smashing.

Tomorrow we continue our esoteric discussions. We covered a lot of ground, but what I personally found exciting was that I can think of so much that I want to ask the man. Luckily, he seems to like my analogy of the Gonzo Daily online magazine being more like a literary version of a country pub than a formal lecture hall.

People come in, talk about something interesting and then go off for a pint or two. He laughed at my other analogy that sometimes I am the genial 'Mine Host', and that sometimes I'm the creepy looking bloke in the corner of the bar with the notebook and the enormous pile of pork scratchings!

I think that my conceptual pub will have regualr visits from Anthony, and probably after a few months he - like Michael Des Barres, and as few others - will have their own tankard hanging behind the bar...

ANTHONY PHILLIPS: A brief taster for what is to come..

If everything goes according to plan, I shall be talking to Anthony Phillips later this afternoon. To celebrate this, and to give you all a taster of what is to come, here is one of my favourite of his tracks:



Check out the Gonzo page for his new album

THE NEW ANTHONY PHILLIPS ALBUM

I have only heard fragments of it so far, but I think that the new Anthony Phillips/Andrew Skeet album Seventh Heaven is really going to be one of the major releases of this spring.

The release sheet describes it as:

A brand new studio 2 CD set from ex-GENESIS guitarist ANTHONY PHILLIPS and composer ANDREW SKEET.

ANDREW SKEET is a composer primarily for television and film, and is much in demand as a conductor and arranger and has worked with GEORGE MICHAEL, SUEDE, UNKLE, SINEAD O’CONNOR, as well as establishing his own orchestra. His music has been featured in The Apprentice, Banged up Abroad, and What Katie Did Next amongst many others.

Featuring on the album is BELINDA SYKES who sings on the track ‘Seven Ancient Wonders’. Belinda has performed at the Carnegie Hall in New York, and has recorded with KARL JENKINS and directs the medieval band JOGLARESA.

Also performing is JOHN PARRICELLI, one of the key figures on the British Jazz scene co-founding the jazz orchestra LOOSE TUBES. He has featured on over 200 movie scores including Lord of the Rings, Shakespeare in Love and The Constant Gardener. He has also recorded with LEONA LEWIS, DUFFY, WESTLIFE, ROBBIE WILLIAMS, RUMER, amongst many others.

All in all an amazing package.

Tracks:
Disc 1: Credo In Cantus, A Richer Earth, Circle of Light, Grand Central, Kissing Gate, Pasquinade, Rain on Sag Harbor, Ice maiden, River of Life, Desert Passage, Seven Ancient Wonders, Desert Passage, Under The Infinite Sky, Forgotten Angels, Courtesan, Ghosts of New York, Shipwreck of St Paul, Cortege.

Disc 2: Credo In Cantus (instrumental), Sojourn, Speak of Remarkable Things, Nocturne, Long Road Home, Golden Leaves of Fall, Credo, Under The Infinite Sky, The Stuff of Dreams, Old Sarum Suite, For Eloise, Winter Song, Ghosts of New York, Daniel’s Theme, Study In Scarlet, The Lives of Others, Pas de Deux, Forever Always.

Anthony Edwin "Ant" Phillips (b. 23 December 1951, Chiswick, west London) is an English multi instrumentalist, best known as a founding member of the band Genesis.

He played guitar and sang backing vocals until leaving in 1970, following the recording of their second album, Trespass. He left due to suffering from stage fright, after being told by his doctor that the best thing would be to leave the band.

He is known for his twelve string guitar work, and his influence can be heard throughout Genesis's early output. Genesis's first album after Phillips's departure, Nursery Cryme, featured two songs which were holdovers from the days when Phillips was in the band: "The Musical Box" (originally called F#) and "The Fountain Of Salmacis." "The Musical Box" especially remains a favourite of fans.

After leaving Genesis, Phillips studied classical music (especially classical guitar) and made recordings in collaboration with Harry Williamson, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins, among others.He played the keyboards on the demos for Peter Gabriel in 1976. His first solo album, The Geese and the Ghost, was issued in 1977.Phillips released his second album in 1978, entitled Wise After the Event. This was followed the next year by Sides. Both of these albums were produced by Rupert Hine and were intended to reach a mainstream audience, though neither album was successful in that regard.

In its initial release in the UK, Sides was accompanied by a more experimental album entitled Private Parts and Pieces; in the U.S. and Canada the two albums were issued separately. Private Parts and Pieces II: Back to the Pavilion followed the next year, and several further sequels were issued in the 1980s and 1990s.

Phillips began writing material with Andrew Latimer of Camel in 1981, and was a featured performer on that band's album, The Single Factor (released in 1982).Phillips released a mainstream pop album entitled Invisible Men in 1983. He later claimed that this project went "horribly wrong" as a result of commercial pressures, and would subsequently eschew mainstream success in favour of more specialised material.Phillips remains involved in a variety of musical projects, including extensive soundtrack work in England often for the label Atmosphere part the Universal Music Group. In the mid-1990s, he released an album entitled The Living Room Concert, which featured solo acoustic versions of his earlier material. He also provided archival material for the first Genesis box set, Genesis Archive 1967-75, released in 1998.Several of his albums feature artwork by Peter Cross.

Check out the Gonzo page for this album

I WAS ON THE ANTHONY PHILLIPS WEBSITE JUST NOW AND LOOK WHAT I FOUND...

OK I am obfuscating slightly. I had an email from the Cheesemeister earlier and he told me about it, but I went on the website of my own volition. On the front page there is a story that reads:

We are pleased to announce the forthcoming release of Seventh Heaven - a brand new collaboration between Ant and composer & arranger Andrew Skeet.

Seventh Heaven is a double album of co-written orchestral and acoustic portraits (featuring some outstanding arrangements by Andrew) which have been recorded by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir. Additional pieces have also been recorded with a string section and an orchestra of leading session musicians. The orchestral tracks are complimented by some acoustic guitar and piano pieces to create a rich and musically diverse collection.

Seventh Heaven is planned for release on April 23rd. More information on the album can be seen here.

There are also links to where you can hear some previews of the music. We will be having likewise on the blog as soon as my copy arrives so I can rip it. I like being an official bootlegger!

LINK: Chris Squire and Steve Hackett team up for album

Michael Buckner / Michael Loccisano, Getty Images

Here’s a riddle, of sorts. What’s a “Squackett?” No, it’s not some hybrid bird created in a lab, unless you want to get metaphorical and consider music a bird and a studio a lab. It’s what you get when you cross Yes bassist Chris Squire (who has played on every one of said band’s records) and onetime Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett. The duo will release ‘A Life Within a Day’ on May 29 via Esoteric Antenna.

The meeting of progressive minds was born when Squire was working on a solo effort, needed some guitar parts and was put in touch with Hackett. During those sessions, Squackett was born. As it turns out, it’s not all the prog that you could ever want in one fell swoop, as the pair chose to take a simpler, more direct sonic route.

“It was very much about a bunch of pals swapping notes and anecdotes,” Hackett stated in a press release. “I would say if people are looking for uncountable time signatures, in the main that’s not what this album holds. I think the songs are more simple and direct.”

Read on...

An Evening With Bill Bruford: American Dates!

Bill Bruford who over the last 18 months or so has been giving well received talks on his career and life has decided to "Head West" and is appearing at selected dates in America in October

Bill will be showing footage and discussing his career and issues raised in his recent autobiography. Books will be available on the night. There will be no hands-on drumming.

Mon. Oct. 17th 8:00 PM Columbus Percussion, 5052 North High St, Columbus OH 43214 Call toll free in the US (800) 775-7372

Tue. Oct. 18th 7:00 PM Sweetwater Music, 5501 U.S. Hwy 30 W, Fort Wayne IN 46818. Call toll free in the US (800) 222 4700

Wed. Oct. 19th 7:30 PM Drum Center of Lexington, 132 Southland Dr, Lexington KY 40503. Call toll free in the US (800) 341 DRUM

Thu. Oct. 20th 7:00 PM Explorer’s Percussion, 8050 Wornall Road, Kansas City MO 64114. Call (816) 361-1195

Sat. Oct. 22nd 2.45 PM Cascio Interstate Music, 13819 W. National Ave, New Berlin WI 53151. Call toll free in the US (800) 462-2263

Mon. Oct. 24th 6.30PM Daddy's Junky Music, 444 Providence Hwy, Dedham, MA 02026 Call (781) 329-9924

Bill Bruford's Website :

http://www.billbruford.com/

Anthony Phillips and Genesis

Anthony Phillips will possibly always be associated with Genesis even though he left the band more than forty years ago. He was however a founder member and also played on the first two Genesis Albums From Genesis To Revealation and Trespass. Since then of course he has carved out his own niche in the music industry releasing solo albums and also composing for film and television projects.

His first four solo albums (Geese and the Ghost/Wise After The Event/Sides/1984) are now available directly from the Gonzo website in expanded editions with a bonus disc containing many rarities and outtakes. Here is an interview Ant did with Jon Kirkman in late 2003 for the newsprint magazine where Ant discusses both his solo career and his time with Genesis.

Interview with Anthony Phillips
December 2003

Anthony Phillips was the original guitarist in Genesis until a combination of stage fright and illness forced him to quit in 1970. For many fans of Genesis that was the end of Anthony’s involvement with the band he formed at school with his friends. The truth is however by the mid seventies Anthony was working again with the various members of Genesis and more noticeably with Mike Rutherford. Anthony’s proper debut came in 1977 with the release of The Geese and The Ghost, which bore all the trademarks of the early Genesis sound. 2004 will see the re release of The Geese and The Ghost and Wise After The Event. Here Anthony talks about his solo career and his days with Genesis or should that be The Janitors? Read on…


JK A lot of people will remember you from Genesis.

AP The Janitors as we were known, one of the first singles we did before we ever got anywhere was announced by I think Jimmy Saville as the Janitors or was it the Genitals (I didn’t say that!)

JK You made two albums and played a few gigs with Genesis and then left. Why was that?

AP All sorts of reasons culminating in a bad bout of stage fright really. I was probably, along with Mike Rutherford one of the keenest to go on the road and was very buoyant about the whole thing. The group was made up of two song-writing pairs Rutherford and myself and Gabriel and Banks. It worked pretty well and when it worked, it worked incredibly well. For me the things I did with Mike were more precious and more special because it was more intimate and somehow it got lost within the group. We all lived together in a cottage and got on top of each other and never got away and we’d argue and all the rest of it. So there was an awful lot of tension in the band. We were too young to realise that you have got to have a separate business and personal life. We had women saying that it’s got to be the group or me, you know this kind of stuff and we were far too intense and too navel gazing really but it is so not true that I left for musical reasons because we all has similar tastes and similar styles. They were fantastic musicians and great composers but I guess the tension got to me. There was an awful lot of pressure at gigs, it got to the point where if you made one mistake it would blow the big record company audition stuff because all the record companies were coming and watching us. I just used to get terribly, terribly tense about the whole thing and eventually my body just cracked under the whole thing. I got bronchial pneumonia and I thought, “Well hang on, this life is not what it is cracked up to be” and I think for the majority of the people it isn’t. It’s not a very natural life and you have got to be incredibly tough and very single minded. We virtually saw no friends at all and had no separate life and at the age of seventeen or eighteen you have to be so determined and I guess I didn’t have the stamina and I did not want to be so narrow I think.

JK Well you left Genesis and for a lot of people there was a big gap, it was virtually seven years between leaving Genesis and the Geese and the Ghost. Fill us in briefly as to what you were doing then.

AP People look at seven years and think, “What the hell was he doing?” Well it is much more easily explained really. The first two to three years – well I spent a year moping if you like – I was totally unqualified as a musician, so I learned how to play the piano properly, learned how to sight read, classical guitar and all that kind of stuff because I wanted to have all that power at my fingertips. I started teaching part time but what isn’t known is that the Geese and the Ghost was started- I was doing things with Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins in ’73, we did a single called the Silver Song which was dedicated to the second Genesis drummer Jonathan Silver which never came out, I was doing things with them quite actively – we began the Geese and the Ghost in ’74 although it did not come out until early ’77


JK The Geese and the Ghost album came out in 1977, not a particularly good year for an album like the Geese and Ghost to come out if you think about what was going on musically with punk and everything else. Looking back on it, are you happy with the album now?

AP Not really because we had to do it on a bit of a shoestring. A lot of the music was concurrent with some of the Genesis stuff. Mike and I wrote a lot of the 12 string stuff in 1969/70 and a lot of the songs that I wrote on it were just after I left in ’70 so the music was quite old so it would have been nice if we had done it earlier. It got terribly protracted, we’d began it in ’74 but when The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway became a double album we got tripped up on that and had to wait and it kept being broken up. The flow got lost, we were recording it on fairly primitive equipment and then on Tom Newman’s barge on the Thames, which kept being rammed, by other barges and we couldn’t fit the timpani on and we had to use the guided tour lot next door. So it was quite fun but it was never going to be gleaming quality and of course we hit a brick wall because as you say punk came out. It was the classic case of being in the right place at the wrong time and very difficult to get any music like that out if you weren’t a massive household name. It was picked up by somebody in the States unsurprisingly by which time I had given up on it really, not a easy thing when you have spent two, three, four years planning something and this is your big return to the business and then nothing happens. I was very pleasantly surprised when it came out, not ideally happy with it but of course delighted when it did see the light of day. A lot of people seemed to like it despite the quote “a semi-garage production”, as somebody referred to it as. The same album, in two American reviews was called a mellow rock classic and then somebody else called it “music to wash dishes to”.

JK Listening to it again recently, I think it’s an album of many layers and it reminds me very much of the Trespass album. Moving on from the Geese and the Ghost, nothing for seven years and then in the next two years three albums, the Geese and the Ghost, Wise After the Event and Sides. That was pretty quick, was that the plan?

AP Well there was no real plan. I was just very lucky that the Geese and the Ghost went down reasonably well then as you have rightly implied the market was changing. There was more pressure to do songs so whilst I thought I was more comfortable doing instrumentals, or just better all round really, I found myself being coerced into more song based things not that I was unhappy with that, I just knew it wasn’t my forte and there was pressure to try and come up with, not necessary immediately hit singles. Wise after the Event wasn’t a totally singly orientated album but by the time of Sides it very much was and that is why Sides ended up being called that. It was going to be called Balls as a piss take on the whole punk scene which would have been great if I had been ten years younger but I wasn’t. It was nonsense that people of my vintage would be expected to turn the clock back and do that kind of ersatz Who music ten years on. It would have been so fake. I do stress that if I had been ten years younger I would have been at the forefront of punk. The fact is, it was ridiculous, so we had Sides which had to be split into the more poppy things and then the more classical side of things but I was extremely lucky to have found an outlet for some pure acoustic guitar music on the same thing when Private Parts and Pieces the acoustic album was released. So I was fortunate compared to a lot of people because for a lot of people the whole ‘76/77 thing was a complete graveyard and they didn’t get a look in.

JK Listening to the Sides album recently, parts of it sound a little off the wall. I am guessing that you like doing the occasional track that is a little off the wall, yes?

AP Oh yeah I certainly did, the idea that I am only a high classicist – I used to get stuff from people who did not know my back ground and they would say that this sounds like a typical classic musician trying to do rock, well it is totally the other way round. I was very much a Beatles, Stones man who got a bit of classical stuff on top. I love both styles. I did feel pressured into trying to come up with overtly sort of hit singles on Sides, which was a little bit uncomfortable, but there’s nothing I am really ashamed of on that album.

JK There was an interesting marketing of Sides in that the album that came shrink-wrapped with Sides was Private Parts and Pieces. What was the original thinking behind what became the Private Parts and Pieces series?

AP Well I think that since the ground had been cut from under my feet in terms of acoustic stuff a bit, I remember going to Tony Smith, Genesis and my manager, and saying “Is there any way we can get an outlet for this stuff and keep it going, you know the acoustic stuff?” and he was really good and listened and managed to get Arista to agree to this. So it set up sort of two careers, a diversion, and a dual path. One a more rock based thing, heavier songs and another intimate acoustics, small scale, slightly vibey, loose productions, more kind of improvised stuff as well. I was really lucky to be able to do that and as you rightly point out it was just called Private Parts and Pieces, there was no idea that there would be volume twenty-seven thousand and all the rest of it. I was so lucky compared to a lot of people to be able to do that. Then when the door closed on the commercial stuff I was able to carry on thank God with the Private Parts series.

JK Just how much pressure was there from the record companies like Arista or RCA bearing in mind that at that time Genesis were doing very well and I suppose someone in the marketing department of these companies would say, “This guy used to be in Genesis – I see a marketing opportunity here”?

AP Of course there was but to be fair, it was difficult for them. Once the Mike Oldfield, Vangelis era had gone it was difficult to see instrumentals being easy to market unless you had a film and singles were becoming more important. My friend Andy Latimer said it all by doing that album called the Single File. If you think back to the late sixties and early seventies we all bought albums and weren’t that interested in singles but the whole market switched round, which was to, me was a most dreadfully regressive step. I understand it for youngsters but not for us. Of course there was pressure and I felt that I was trying to be something that I wasn’t. I had to stunt and regress my musical development and ran the very serious risk of not getting new fans in the process and alienating old ones. It was something that I used to wrestle with all the time. The amount of people who must have thought in 1984 what is he up to, then even more so on the Invisible Man but then I suppose in context Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks attempted very commercial albums at the same time so I suppose I was in reasonable company really.


JK When we look at the complete catalogue of your music, it must be very satisfying to look back on a body of work like that?

AP Well I’m never happy which is why you keep moving on. My New Year’s resolution is “Can do Better” Of course I am happy when I get wonderful fan letters about some of the albums saying how much it has meant to them. I have met so many people who have said to me “Thank you for helping me through my A levels and degrees”. Of course it is lovely but you always want to do more, you always want to do better and to be honest I still feel as though I have only just begun actually. Some people feel they have done it all, I don’t feel that I have done anything and I think that is a great motivation for wanting to go forward.



© Jon Kirkman 2003 and 2011.

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