Prog Issue 53

Contents Issue 53 04.02.15

it’s on here

scarlet page

if it’s in there

Cover

feature

I find the very idea of someone being allowed to fade away like that disturbing.

Steven Wilson p46 Dark social awareness is explored on his new album Hand. Cannot. Erase.

FEATURES Readers’ Poll___________ Pg 36

REGULARS

BLOODY WELL WRITE

pg 10

Missives, musings and tweets from Planet Prog.

THE INTRO

pg 12

The latest Prog Stage line-up from Ramblin’ Man, Arena’s plans for their 20th anniversary and former Frost* singer Dec Burke unveils AudioPlastik. Plus Bend Sinister, Darkher and much more…

RECORD COLLECTION

pg 30

Visionary artist and illustrator Dave McKean reveals all about King Crimson, Rush and John Cale as he lets us have a rummage through his record collection.

Q&A

pg 32

Alan Parsons on what lurks in his musical vaults and why it’s taken him so long to return to the UK.

THE LABELS THAT BUILT PROG

pg 56

pg 72

They sowed the seeds of love but did Tears For Fears harvest the fruits of prog as well? We quiz a host of musicians, including the band’s founder, Roland Orzabal.

THE MUSICAL BOX

pg 94

We eye up cover artist Steven Wilson’s latest, as well as new releases from Enslaved, King Crimson, Lonely Robot, Neal Morse Band, Pallas, Van der Graaf Generator and many more…

TAKE A BOW

pg 118

Peter Gabriel’s three-part Newcastle show leads this issue’s live reviews, along with Fish, Marillion, Meshuggah, The Pineapple Thief, Tangerine Dream, Touchstone, Trojan Horse and lots more.

BRAINSTORM

Peter Hammill__________Pg 60

“I ended up with 60 ideas that engaged me enough to pursue them…” Van der Graaf’s founder is still bursting with creativity.

Beardfish____________________ Pg 64

“People can take music too seriously sometimes…” The hairy Swedes find humour outside their comfort zone.

Luna Rossa_________________ Pg 68 “Diversifying is the key!” Panic ‘Roomies’ Anne-Marie Helder and Jonathan Edwards let their softer, acoustic side out.

Pain Of Salvation___________ Pg 76

We explore the early years of Charisma Records and discover how they made prog history with commitment and a roster of exciting young bands.

THE OUTER LIMITS

“I’m baffled people even know who we are!”

A shocked Opeth are among the winners as we round up your favourites from 2014.

pg 130

Comedian, actor and experimental musician Matt Berry gets his prog-entials well and truly tested.

“I know that I want to do this because I missed it…” Daniel Gildenlöw faces the music after his near-death experience.

Toundra_____________________ Pg 80

“The venues were full and the people were crazy!” The Spanish post-rockers‘ atmospheric instrumentals attract a very enthusiastic new fanbase.

Fish On Friday______________ Pg 84

“This is a really good benchmark album which deserves to be in the public domain.”

This Belgian band are no longer small fry.

Periphery ____________________ Pg 88

“I don’t care what random people say about my music or my band…” US prog metallers push the boundaries with their conceptual double-decker Juggernaut.

Shattered Skies_____________ Pg 92

“Our title track is an 11-minute monster that goes in crazy directions…” The melodic groovers get bigger and brighter.

Not Just Another

Face In The Crowd

46 progmagazine.com

On his new album Hand. Cannot. Erase., Steven Wilson looks to a tragic death for inspiration. Is it the album that will elevate him to mainstream fame? Prog asks this and more, delving into the details of the man behind the music with a little help from those who know him best in this in-depth insight into the figurehead for modern prog…

Words: Jerry Ewing Portraits: Scarlet Page

building: Lasse Hoile

D

ecember 2003: It is a few days before Christmas. In her North London bedsit, Joyce Carol Vincent has just returned from a shopping trip in Wood Green. She turns the heating up to banish the bitter December chill and flicks on the television for some company before contemplating the wrapped Christmas presents laid out before her.

The past few years have been somewhat tumultuous for the attractive young woman of Grenadine descent. She resigned from her job working in the treasury department of well-known financiers Ernst & Young a few years prior in 2001 and had sought help following domestic abuse, spending some time in a shelter in Haringey and later finding work in a small hotel. For reasons that are only known to herself, she had slowly retreated from contact with her four older sisters. Her mother had died when she was 11, her father, with whom she had a fractious relationship, would die in 2004, although an indication of the turmoil surrounding Vincent at the time led her to claim he’d died in 2001.

Quite why Vincent chose to cut herself off from her family we’ll never know. Was it shame from the alleged domestic abuse? Was it from her fall from grace from a well-paid city job and a life that had brought the young Londoner into contact with the likes of Nelson Mandela and Gil-Scott Heron, as well as having dined with Stevie Wonder, to working in a budget hotel?

Perhaps she was even still suffering at the hands of her then-fiancé? None of this we will ever know.

What we do know, however, from the Christmas gifts wrapped and ready to be delivered that sat around her, is that there appears to have been a move to rebuild bridges with her sisters. Some of those gifts were addressed to members of a family she had not seen for almost two years. It seems that Joyce Vincent was on the verge of hauling her life out of the doldrums of the past two years – wherein she’d suffered at the hands of the aforementioned domestic abuse and more recently had been treated for a peptic ulcer at hospital – and was on the path to sorting out the

What’s WILSON really like?

Ian Anderson “Steven possesses an intellectual musicality that’s admirable. He’s also obsessed with music, and obsessed with the musical legacy of the 60s and 70s.

I think all of that would be a little worrying if it wasn’t for the fact that he also gets out on a stage in front of thousands of people as a performer, and gets to do that other thing which is not really geek-like at all.

If it wasn’t for that then he’d be in danger of being a geek and probably be even paler and more vegan than he is.” SS

loose threads.

Joyce Vincent never delivered those Christmas presents.

She would never see any member of her family again, despite her sisters hiring a private detective, who indeed found Joyce’s bedsit in Wood Green, but got no reply, despite the sound of the television emanating from inside the flat. Nor did the letters her sisters would then write receive a response, leaving them resigned to the idea that their once bright and bubbly sibling had severed all familial ties.

Joyce Vincent’s body was discovered on January 25, 2006, lying amongst those undelivered gifts. The television was still on, as was the central heating.

Half of her rent had been paid monthly to the Metropolitan Housing Trust by various benefits agencies. No neighbour had raised any concern about the missing tenant, the rank smell coming from the bedsit, or the constant hum of the television. It was only when rent arrears built up to some £2,400 that the bailiffs were sent in. The front door remained doublelocked, there was no sign of a break-in, the police report ruled death by natural causes, but the skeletal body was too badly decomposed to conduct a full post-mortem.

It seemed that Joyce Vincent, a young, bright, attractive and upwardly mobile woman with a good job, had died, while the world turned away, apparently oblivious, and resumed going about its business…

What’s going on with? WILSON ON HIS OTHER PROJECTS

PORCUPINE TREE “Never say never, is what I say. But at the moment there are no plans to do anything. The next year at least is likely to be taken up with my new solo album, and the other guys are all busy with their own projects so I’m not even certain when we could find time to do anything. I’m certainly not averse to the idea of working with them again, but at this point I have no idea what form that might take.” progmagazine.com 47

Peter Hammill: still exploring the dark corners of music.

Rikki Don’t Lose That Number…

Van der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill reflects on his groundbreaking solo album Nadir’s Big Chance, 40 years old this year.

Words: Daryl Easlea Main Portrait: Will Ireland

60 progmagazine.com

Michael Putland/Getty Images

S

itting in the upstairs lounge of a reassuringly old school boozer on a squally, rainy Thursday in a post-new year London, 2012 Prog Awards Visionary Peter Hammill is clearly not suffering the January blues. Quaffing his Guinness, one would never spot that he had a major heart attack 12 years ago. Rather than sending him into a peaceful, prolonged convalescence tending his sizeable archive, Hammill reformed Van der Graaf Generator in 2005 (more in next month’s issue), going on to release four studio and two live albums, as well as four of his own albums, plus Other World, his acclaimed collaboration with Gary Lucas.

Prog is here to talk about his new record, the three-CD box set …all that might have been… and to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his remarkable album Nadir’s Big Chance.

The invention of alter ego Rikki Nadir and the album Nadir’s Big Chance took the absolute opposite of the painstaking approach that Hammill has taken with …all that might have been… An artist who frequently compartmentalises his work, the significant and discrete strain of his ‘three-chord trick’ blasts are, if not always his most satisfying, certainly his most direct. From his 1975 birth, for the next decade, Nadir heavily influenced Hammill’s work.

“It was a pretty manic, pretty productive period,” Hammill marvels today. “Often the restriction on making records is not having the material, but it was churning out, so I made the records.”

The idea for a quick and dirty album came at the end of 1974 after Hammill had delivered arguably his densest work, In Camera. He, Hugh Banton, Guy Evans and David Jackson had decided to reform Van der Graaf Generator, who had split two years earlier. Hammill had a body of songs gathered over the past decade that he wanted to get out of his system, so he asked the band to help him.

“In my mind, Nadir is paired with [1971’s] Fool’s Mate, in that they were older songs,” Hammill says. “Fool’s Mate was loosely a pop record, and so was this. I had the enthusiasm of starting again and it was made in the knowledge that we were going to be reforming. It had a significant effect on the way we were afterwards.”

What prompted such a change in direction from the cape-wearing Sturm und Drang meister of In Camera? “We knew we were going to be doing the Van der Graaf Generator recordings, so anything we did on this had to be a long way away from that. The three-chord trick is the foundation of everything, really.

VdGG, 1974, l-r: Guy Evans, Hugh Banton, Peter Hammill, David Jackson.

The three-chord trick is the foundation of everything, really. What you can get out of D, A and G is wonderful, alchemical stuff – just set it up, belt it out.

The appearances of Rikki Nadir, from top: Nadir’s Big Chance; Shingle Song; The Polaroid.

What you can get out of D, A and G is wonderful, alchemical stuff – just set it up, belt it out.”

The album was recorded in the first week of December 1974 at Rockfield Studios on the Welsh borders. “It was a residential studio, but not many of them had herds of cows passing by your window first thing in the morning. It was very necessary for the project. We recorded sitting in the room together, swapping instruments in places. At times I’m playing bass, Hugh [Banton] is playing clavinet; an old school recording.”

Nadir’s Big Chance was released in early February 1975, with John Peel playing tracks from the album on his show on February 6. Hammill’s sleevenotes made it plain: “The anarchic presence of Nadir – the loud, aggressive, perpetual 16-year-old – had temporary though complete dominion, and I can only submit, gladly, and play his music – the beefy punk songs, the

weepy ballads, the soul struts.”

The album certainly has an abundance of all three. The prescient title track, Birthday Special and Nobody’s Business take care of punk; old friend and former VdGG member Chris Judge Smith’s Been Alone So Long and Hammill’s Shingle Song provide the tears; and Open Your Eyes nods to the soul struts and Hammill’s spiritual home, the Derby Locarno.

The album closes with the astonishing rail against the music business, Two Or Three Spectres, which Hammill today calls “horribly prophetic”.

Wasn’t your label Charisma supposed to be the antithesis of this?

“Charisma also had to be a business and it had to survive,” Hammill explains. “That idealistic root remained there, but if the numbers didn’t add up, nobody would be making records. I was a very idealistic young man when I came in: a lot of it, I regret, had to be beaten out of me.”

Would you say that Two Or Three Spectres was almost your resignation letter from being a pop star? “Kind of, yes,” he admits. “Which is odd considering Van der Graaf were about to start again.”

Nadir helped Hammill survive the punk wars, though. “We would have survived in any case,” Hammill reckons, “but Nadir was enough of a marker to show clearly that side of me.”

In July 1977, John Lydon went on Capital Radio and selected his favourite records. Among the selections from Augustus Pablo, Can and Nico were two tracks from Nadir’s Big Chance: The Institute Of Mental Health, Burning and Nobody’s Business. Lydon was sincere in his appraisal: “Peter Hammill is great… I’m damn sure progmagazine.com 61

Tears For Fears

The synthpop stars were chart-topping 80s icons and purveyors of multimillion-selling anthems. But they also worked with prog’s best and brightest, were inspired by Genesis and Yes, and have now been remixed

by Steven Wilson. So we ask the big question: How prog were Tears For Fears? Words: Paul Lester

72 progmagazine.com

“Some of the musicianship wasn’t a million miles away from 80s Yes. They were a band with depth in a pop world.”

Paul Draper, Mansun and out of fashion over the years. At the time they were phenomenally successful, but they lacked credibility because they didn’t have a normal band line-up. Critics don’t like that sort of thing.

“They weren’t really a band, not in the rock’n’roll sense. They didn’t sound rough at the edges; they were working with the best session players and it all sounded very polished.

But like they say about Quincy Jones, the best thing about him is his address book. Even as a teenager

GETTY

F

ar be it from Prog to suggest that Tears For Fears were straight-up prog. But they did feature associates of King Crimson and Camel on their 1983 debut album The Hurting, and the second, 1985’s Songs From The Big Chair, included members of Stackridge and Peter Gabriel’s band, as well as a song dedicated to Robert Wyatt.

The multimillion-selling …Big Chair was hailed by the Progarchy website as the greatest prog-pop album ever, rivalled only by XTC’s Skylarking and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

By their third, 1989’s The Seeds Of Love, there were appearances by everyone from Phil Collins to Jon Hassell. Hell, even Rick Wright’s son-in-law played bass on the fourth, 1993’s Elemental, while the recent 5.1 surround sound mix of …Big Chair was courtesy of Steven Wilson. Oh, and their forthcoming seventh LP, their follow-up to 2004’s Everybody Loves A Happy Ending, is being co-produced

by Chris Braide – founder member, along with Trevor Horn and Lol Creme, of Producers. It also includes a track that mainmen Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith have described as “Portishead meets Queen”. Okay, maybe they were a bit prog.

“Start Of The Breakdown, the last track on The Hurting, was really proggy,” says ex-Mansun man Paul Draper. A huge fan of Tears, he admits their vocal melodies and chord progressions had a big impact on his band. “The arrangement, the way it builds – it could be from a Pink Floyd album. The whole of side two of …Big Chair, from Broken to Head Over Heels and the live version of Broken, was pure prog. Some of the musicianship wasn’t a million miles away from 80s Yes. “They were a band with depth in a pop world,” he adds. “They were massive, even if they have gone in

Songs From The Big Chair turned Tears For Fears into globe-straddling stars.

Curt Smith (left) and Roland Orzabal today.

I liked the fact that Elemental was overproduced, and The Seeds Of Love had this grandiose, mad, psychedelic, stretched‑out title track. It was sophisticated and overblown.

“Mansun had the same A&R guy as Tears at one point and he told me Roland is a real perfectionist in the studio. Apparently, he [Orzabal] came to one of our gigs in the 90s and wanted to meet us, but we didn’t get the chance. I still want to meet him.

In fact, I still want to work with him!”

When Prog speaks to Orzabal and relates the prog love for Tears For Fears, he is flattered.

“It’s very nice,” he says, even if he is barely awake – it’s morning in Los Angeles, where he is working on that seventh Tears album with Smith and Braide, alongside highly regarded rising Vienna-based electronica producer Christopher ‘Sohn’ Taylor.

Asked whether he agrees with the connections made between Tears and prog, he replies: “I suppose the obvious track is Listen [the sevenminute climax to …Big Chair]. You hear it and you think of the two words that one always associates with long, trippy music: Pink Floyd. Mothers Talk [the first single from the album, in August 1984] was a bit of a steal from Weather Report’s Teen Town, especially the bass part at the end, which was a sort of tribute to Jaco Pastorius. Hey, you know, we grew up with Genesis and Yes and that kind of stuff.”

Orzabal recalls that, “ridiculous as it may sound”, he and Tears partner Smith hooked up after he heard the latter singing Blue Öyster Cult’s Then Came The Last Days Of May. After a brief period in ska band Graduate and another as metalheads History Of Headaches, Orzabal and Smith joined forces as Tears For Fears, an opportunity for the friends from Bath to exorcise their respective

Orzabal and Smith may have had the 80s look, but their songs were far from throwaway pop.

You hear Listen and you think of the two words that one always associates with long, trippy music: Pink Floyd.

Roland Orzabal

progmagazine.com 73

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