Text: Anne-Marie Forker
Photo: Albert Sanchez
Hello Bryan! How are you doing?
Good! Beautiful Spring day, isn’t it?
It is. I love this time of year.
Yes, it’s the best, isn’t it?
It is indeed. Speaking of Spring and everything fresh, this album you’ve created is something I’ve not heard before. It’s very fresh.
That’s lovely to hear. Thank you.
It has evocative imagery in it. One of my favourite lines was about the “skin in the hands is tight from turpentine”. My father was an artist and it just instantly brought me back to the smell of my childhood.
Ah! That’s great, how you get fragments from the lyrics registering in your brain. It happens in music as well and it brings you back to life. It’s great, I like the text because they’re about real life, every-day life, those sort of images. Somehow, Amelia [Barratt] poeticises them and adds some sort of quirkiness. It’s very interesting and when I first heard the work, I thought it was really good. Amelia came to the studio here, about three years ago, to record a book of text, an audiobook of maybe a dozen texts. I thought they were great and said, “why don’t we try doing some with music, write some for me, and I’ll put some music with them and see how it goes, how it runs”. It’s been running very well. I like the work very much and we’re well on the way with the second album now. I’ve been very busy.
That’s good news. There’s quite a haunting quality about the music. The piano on “The Florist” and “On Landscape” really stand out. Are her words given to you first, and then you write the music?
That’s right. Sometimes, they’re fragments, bits of piano stuff that I have already and I then work with them if I think they might go well with that text, mood wise, and that’ll spark things. There are no rules about it but that’s what I like. That’s freed me up again as an artist, and given me a new burst of life.
That’s what it’s all about, that kind of feeling. I’m a photographer, and I know it’s that kind of “burst of life” that I’m looking for, that feeling.
Yeah, sometimes things just work, don’t they, and you don’t want to question it too much because you think “oh that’s a gift from God” or something.
Absolutely. Your singing in the background and the piano work in “On Landscape”, is almost like a heartbeat, the pulse of the piano. Are you deliberately speaking to the senses when you’re playing, to channel feeling?
Sometimes it just comes out, other times it’s a voice. I’m just in a zone with it, as it were. The piano bits are usually the originating musical parts and it’ll be the first time I’ve ever played them, so it’s not something I’ve rehearsed or anything. They’re freestyle things. So it’s very immediate and then you work on it, sometimes years, months or days later, and start adding other things to it and creating, like a picture, with other musicians. I’ve worked with some great people, who’ve come in to my studio – one by one. I like to work individually with people. Paul Thompson from Roxy Music plays on the title track. Andy Newmark plays on a couple of things. They both have a long history with me, and are both brilliant players. There’s a third drummer called Nathan. We call him “Tug”, “Tug the Drummer”, and he’s more an electronic and New Wave kind of drummer. There’s a young modular synth guy, wires everywhere, called Maxwell Sterling, he’s a really good young lad. James, who I work with, the engineer, is in his late 20s. He’s been with me for eight years or something, since he was an intern. It’s so good when you build up a relationship with these people. There’s a few good guitar players as well, just doing sonic things, just sounds and sometimes rhythmic things. I think it’s nice for songs to have a rhythm with the words, as long as the rhythm or the melodies or any of the music don’t get in the way of the words. I don’t want that because I want people to hear the words even though you’d hear some more clearly than others. I found that when I was a kid with records, I didn’t quite know what the lyrics were until years later. Certain words would escape me or I’d misinterpret them. And then you go “Oh that’s what it really was!”. But if you knew the feeling, that’s the feeling that counts. It’s the feeling that counts in this too. It’s always the glue to everything I create, I think.
You struck the balance well on this record. None of the music interferes with the words. The music is very much present and as much of the evocative imagery as the lyrics themselves. Are you going to play any of it live?
We haven’t done any live and there are no plans to, certainly at the moment. I wanted to have finished at least the second album before we thought of anything like that. Then you have a body of work. It’s nice listening to it on your own in the dark and you don’t need to be in a concert hall. On the release day, a couple of weeks back, they had a playback at the ICA in London, in the dark with people just listening to it. Apparently it went very well. I didn’t go there.
That sounds wonderful. It’s a nice venue as well.
It’s always been an interesting venue, since I was an art student. This work takes me back to my art student days, of course, because Amelia is an artist and I went to art school, too. So, we have that, coming to it from an art perspective.
Speaking of art, the video which I understand you made for “The Orchestra” …
With James, the engineer. You know, it’s so amazing nowadays – you can make it on one of these [holds up his phone].
You made it with your phone?
Oh yeah. It was very homemade and so it seemed integrated with the work, somehow. Amelia did a reading and we filmed her. Then we edited it and Amelia took the picture.
It’s very Film Noir, isn’t it?
Yeah, it’s Film Noir indeed. It’s come out well. I’ve always liked albums, LPs, all those lovely old Blue Note jazz records. They’re proper things and you used to cherish those. I still have the records I had when I was nine years old, I still have the sleeves and everything.
The image of the window in “The Orchestra” video struck a chord with me. I have this book called “Windows in Art”, with a Vilhelm Hammershøi window on the cover. The book is a collection of windows painted throughout history.
Windows and railings, I like. That window, it’s in my barn. It’s where we filmed some of the things. But I’m in the studio now, in London. We work downstairs underneath here.
What it was about the image of a window that appealed to you?
It just looked like a lovely cool space, and obviously an empty room. It looked good and I wanted I kind of silhouette. It just seemed to work, you know? Sometimes things just look right. If you’re lucky, you’ll find the right thing. You have to put the time into trying, and hope you get lucky with stuff. You’ve got to put the hours in, I believe, and slug away sometimes and then something great happens. Then you’re thankful and you think “well, if it was easy, they’d all be doing it”, you know? [laughs]
It’s the same with photography, you can take fifty pictures, but there’s one that’s special.
It’s interesting, isn’t it?
Going back to the very beginning, and you mentioned your records from when you were nine years old, how did you very first get into music?
My first memories of it are my Auntie Enid babysitting me when I was about five and her playing the Ink Spots again and again. I actually have those records, 78s of course. And then when, I don’t know whether it was about nine or ten, I started getting interested in hearing things on the radio. There was a kind of traditional jazz, New Orleans jazz revival craze in Britain. Through that, it led to the authentic American, New Orleans jazz from the 1920s. Then you get into that and the early blues singers, and all that stuff. My uncle Brian took me to my first concert, which was Chris Barber’s jazz band. They had this singer called Lonnie Donegan. He was the banjo player. As well as being in the band, he had a big hit under his own name called “Rock Island Line”, which was a Lead Belly blues song, and that popularised that whole genre. So I guess a lot of kids like me, at that age, who heard this stuff, and people like Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, for my generation were turned on to American Music by that, the whole journey in music of listening and finding out what you liked and what you didn’t like. I love Charlie Parker, I’m always talking about him because he was a genius and there are several of them – obviously, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and singers like Billy Holiday and all sorts. Then Motown and Stax was a big influence. Otis Redding and those great musicians from Memphis. When I was a student, I hitchhiked to London to see the Stax World Show with Otis Redding and all those great stars they had – Eddie Floyd, Sam & Dave and that great famous drummer Al Jackson Jr., and Booker T. It was like an all-star thing, really amazing. I thought “if I could only make my art as intense as this and have a link with people…”, because the audience were going mad, you know. I thought, “wow, how could I do it?” And so I somehow drifted into music. I was already in a college band, but after that experience, it was quite a turning point, I think. Then, after I graduated, I moved to London and started writing. I was teaching art a bit and doing odd jobs to make money. I was starting to write these songs which became the first Roxy album. So that’s my history.
I wondered how you choose music. So you decided then in London, that music was the thing?
From the ages of around 16, 17 when I had started getting into art at school. I thought maybe I wanted to be an art historian. I loved Kenneth Clark and “Civilisation” on TV, watching that. Inspiring things, you know, learning about the development of art over the centuries. Then, as I studied it more and more, I wanted to be an artist myself and that’s how I got into art. And then, my love of music drew me into that. I thought “maybe I can make pictures in sound”. I was edging towards that, and then I found these great guys, one by one, over a period of a year or so in London. Andy MacKay and Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, and then Paul Thompson. Then I had a band! I thought – maybe these songs can become my art and that was the idea. And so it went on. Now I’m back doing what I like [laughs].
What are your favourite memories from the auditions for Roxy Music, I understand you placed ads in The Melody Maker?
Oh yeah. I put an ad out for a guitarist and we decided we’d audition people. First of all, we had this guy called David O’List, who was very good. That was for a few months and then Phil came in and he was really good and very versatile, and eager to try any style. I wanted each song to have a different style of it, to sound different to each other. Even within certain songs there’d be collages – it would jump from one thing to another within one song. I like that. It was the whole idea of patching things together. In the end, I put an ad in The Melody Maker saying “Wonder drummer wanted for underground band”. These people came along and there was this guy with really long hair covered with brick dust, because he’d been working on a building site. That was Paul Thompson. He was a Geordie like me. I really took to him and I thought he was great. He played with such passion and power and conviction. It was brilliant, it was just luck that the right pieces all fitted in.
I was always fascinated by the oboe aspect.
Well, the oboe, you see, that’s one of my favourite instruments. So, how Andy, who plays oboe, came into the band – first of all, it was just me and the bass player, Graham Simpson – I’d lived in the same house as Graham in Newcastle, when I was a student. He studied English, I studied Art, and he was in the college band playing bass. He was a so cool, Graham, a great sense of humour. He was a Libra like me. He was a great fan of Eric Dolphy, the sax player, the more avantgarde American jazz musicians, he was very into that. His best friend was a guy called Evan Parker, He’s very far out. So first of all, just me and Graham, when I was writing the songs and putting it all together. Then I bumped into this artist friend of mine, Tim Head, who I was at college with, and I was telling him I’m writing songs and I said, “I really want to use some electronic sounds in what I’m doing. Do you know anybody?” He said “Well, I know this guy Andy MacKay, who studies music at Reading”, which was where Tim was doing a postgraduate course. I said I’d really like to meet him and he came along. That night, he joined the band. So then there were three. He played oboe beautifully. He’d studied music, and I wanted to have somebody in the band who had a classical kind of training. He played sax as well and he had this great synthesiser. Then there were three of us and we didn’t have a tape recorder. It was before cassettes were invented and we didn’t have a reel-to-reel player. We didn’t have any record of what we were doing and I said it would be great if we could record some of this and Andy said “I know this guy Brian Eno, he’s got a big tape recorder”. So, he came along with a huge tape recorder and we met him. He came to the house where I was living, just down the road from him in Kensington, and he recorded us. He saw Andy’s synth and thought “Oh great, it’s a synthesiser”, and that’s how it all happened.
Wow. So when Brian first came there was no intention that he would join the band?
No, he just came to record,
Fascinating, I didn’t know that.
Then he stayed and that was great. He was brilliant.
Do you ever think about working with Brian again?
Oh yeah. But I’m really busy all the time and he is too. We did do something together a few years ago on one of the albums I did. I saw him earlier this year. He’s doing really well, still.
What comes next for you?
Well, I’m still exploring the possibilities of this work with Amelia and it’s great. She lives up in Glasgow and works there at her art studio. She writes things and sends them down. I’m already looking to album three, you know.
Are you thinking of this year or next year?
I’m not sure. We’ll see how long – it takes a while to set up everything. You’ve got to get the records made in factories, which I don’t like. We are doing it ourselves, which is great. It’s all very self-contained here. It’s like a little factory kind of thing. Long may it continue!
Absolutely. Thank you for continuing to create those “bursts of life” and breaths of fresh air. I’m really looking forward to hearing albums two and three.
Thank you very much. Great talking to you.
First published in Norway Rock Magazine #2/2025