Words: Rich Harding
Photo: Hajo Muller
Live photo: Anne-Marie Forker
– The Mute Gods – how long have you been working on that then?
– Three years.
– Yeah?
– Yeah, I actually wrote the record three times – so third time lucky, I guess.
– Okay, cool.
– I had a lot of material lying around and then I thought, «It should be better than this», so I kept on sort of upping the game every five minutes, and then I’d run stuff past the A&R department – that was part of the deal with myself was that I would listen to the A&R department because I respect it and I used to be one myself and I figured, «If an A&R man can’t make another A&R man happy then»
– You used to do A&R, did you?
– Yeah…
– When was that, in the 90s or something?
– It was between 93 and 94.
– Okay. Any big signings you were responsible for or people you found?
– I worked with a band called Let Loose. They had a number 5 hit and a number 13 hit; I also worked on a lot of projects like «Four Weddings And A Funeral».
– Okay
– Then there was the Page & Plant «Unleaded» on VH1, that came through our office. That sort of stuff.
– I was slightly surprised to hear you’d done that because you’ve obviously played with so many different people over the years, I’m amazed you had time!
– It came at a time when my first wife was expecting my first daughter.
– Lula, who sings on the album.
– Yeah, it was 22 years ago. I wanted to try and be at home more and I figured that taking a job as an A&R man would fill that gap quite well. And also it seemed for a while, well, I thought, «you know what, it might be time to hang up my plectrum» but the universe is a strange organism and it drew me back in eventually.
– Which artist drew you back in first?
– First artist that drew me back in was Alphaville.
– Ah, okay, «Forever Young» and all that.
– Yeah, then Warren Cuccurulo.
– Guitarist from Duran Duran.
– Yeah, and Frank Zappa.
– I always forget about that bit because I’m more of a fan of Duran Duran than Frank Zappa.
– I tend to forget about the Duran Duran bit, ‘cos I’m a big Zappa fan. It was Warren and then Belinda Carlisle, and by the time I was in Belinda’s band that was it, I’d finished with A&R completely and it was onwards into new territory.
– Was she still doing quite big tours at that point?
– We did some big stadiums supporting people like Rod Stewart and Elton John.
– What was I reading about Rod Stewart in an article just now in The Guardian… I know, apparently he has a spare hotel room when he’s on tour, so that he can carry on building bits of his model railway.
– Yeah, sounds about right.
– I was reading earlier on Wikipedia – so it may all be complete rubbish! – the huge number of artists that you have actually played with. You were in Iona, weren’t you, the rock/folk band?
-Yeah.
– When was that?
– That was 1989. It was the tail end of the first incarnation of Ellis, Biggs and Howard and then I did two or three albums with Iona. Then I left that and became an A&R man.
– I think you met up with Howard Jones in the late nineties, didn’t you?
:- Yeah, that was when I was working with Belinda Carlisle, actually. I’d been working with Belinda and I was coming back from Malibu, Howard was on the plane and we just talked and talked and really hit it off and he asked me if I fancied touring with him and I said, «Of course». I toured with Howard for a long time, America quite a few times; he’s a dear friend of mine and we keep in contact.
– So when did you first start to be drawn in to the progressive world that you’re known now for being a part of, with the likes of Lifesigns and Steven Wilson?
– Well it was incremental really, because I was always a fan of that kind of music. Before all of this, I’d done an album with Steve Howe, his second solo album, «The Grand Scheme Of Things», and then some time later John-Paul Jones asked me to join his trio, and I was playing chapman stick in that, and then I got Robert Fripp involved in Iona and he did a few guests with Iona on the «Beyond These Shores» album, playing soundscapes, because he really liked that band. He also did some stuff with a later incarnation of Ellis, Beggs & Howard.
– But essentially you’ve spent a lot of time out on the road touring with a huge variety of different artists and music.
– Yes, I think I have. I’ve been touring even more recently with a lot of people. A lot of the stuff I did before was more studio based but a lot of the artists I work with now are quite big touring artists, so I go with them.
– You’ve done a lot with Steve Hackett, haven’t you?
– I joined Steve Hackett’s band in 2009.
– That’s where you met Roger King, of course.
– That’s how I met Roger, and we got on very well, so when I started this project I said, «I don’t want to produce this, you’ll do a far better job than I will, I want someone to bring clarity». He’s such a great asset to any project and I said, «Let’s see how we do, let’s move it forward incrementally a track at a time – that was about two years ago.»
– So you didn’t have an overall plan from the album when you started, or did you have themes you wanted to cover but no specific overall plan?
– No, I didn’t even have a name.
– For either the album or the project?
– It was very malleable at that stage and I had to conceptualise it as I was going on and as the material shaped up. As I was writing material I was asking myself a lot of questions like what is it that really matters to you, what is it that really makes you angry and what is it that you want to tell people; what opinions do you want to get across, because if you’ve got nothing to say then there’s no point making a record. I didn’t want to make an instrumental record because I’d done two solo chapman stick albums already, plus a «best of»…
– I was going to ask you if you’ve done an album before where you’ve been the lead vocalist…
– No, the only albums I’d done as the lead vocalist was with Kajagoogoo.
– Oh, when you shortened the name to Kaja?
– That’s right, that was the third record…
– And you were the lead vocalist on that?
– Yes, and the second Kajagoogoo album.
– So this is the first time for almost thirty years where you’ve been the lead vocalist on an album then?
– And the first time when it’s been my project.
– So it took you three years to put together; quite organic but, I imagine, also dictated by the amount of time that you’ve been out touring.
– No, I wrote the record while I was touring. I wrote it on the laptop, recorded and demoed in hotel rooms and dressing rooms.
– Interesting…
– You spend a lot of time on the road but there’s a lot of downtime.
– A lot of bands used to do that but that’s the first I’ve heard it for some time. I mean Marillion famously put «Misplaced Childhood» together on the road, adding bit by bit in soundchecks, writing lyrics in hotel rooms, as they went, but you don’t tend to hear that as much these days.
– I think in some ways people think it’s not a real way of making records. I think there’s an element, particularly within the progressive genre that everyone has to be sitting in the room at the same time for it to be a bona fide work but that’s not realistic; that’s not the way people make records.
– It’s quite difficult to make records like that, isn’t it, because it is complete happenstance if all of the people sitting in the room happen to be in the same kind of frame of mind at the same point, to make the same track.
– Yes, and of course there’s the other overriding issue which is commerce; it’s incredibly expensive to work like that. There’s another footnote to this and – and maybe it’s part of why it took me three years to make the final record: you need time to reflect and to be really considerate of what I’ve done, to work out whether it’s any good or not, whether it has any saving graces or whether it goes in the bin, as it did do, twice.
– Substantial amounts went in the bin twice?
– Two albums.
– You’ve literally started over, as the yanks say, three times?
– Yeah.
– There are no vestiges or remnants of the first two times, or some remnants but very little?
– No. I could play you three separate albums and say, «This is the stuff I wrote for the first one. This is the stuff I wrote for the second. This is the stuff I wrote for the third.». The stuff for the third is more developed, so I went the course with it.
– So the themes that I pick up from listening to it a few times. There is a relationship theme running through it but, more importantly, there’s a lot about, how do we put this, «The disconnect between most people’s perception of what is going on in the world and what is actually going on in the world».
– That’s absolutely correct.
– *I* know what I mean by that – you elaborate on it.
– I couldn’t put that more eloquently; that’s a perfect vignette. The way you summed that up is quite perfect.
– I’ve written my own album on the subject a couple of years ago, but tell the readers what the themes are that you’re discussing in there.
– The first one, «Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me» is inspired by the speeches of General Dwight D Eisenhower when he warned the world of the dangers of the rise of the independent military-industrial complex. The way in which that now is very much a part of the US military. The way in which – they’re referred to as DUMs, Deep Underground Military bases, they put these things so far underground, they’re almost hermetically sealed, they’re citadels, they’re vast and they’re all over America and they’re all over the world and we are just grunts. The general populus have no idea what is going on in the world.
– It’s rather appropriate – disheartening but appropriate still – that we’re talking the day after the UK voted to get involved in the chaos in Syria.
– Yeah, there was only ever going to be one outcome of that. And, of course, there is no end game in sight.
– Some people would say – and I’d probably include myself – that that’s kind of the point.
– How do you mean?
– There isn’t intended to be an end game.
– No, but if you’re actually going to start killing people – and killing civilians as well, I think you have to know why. From my understanding, the only reason we’re doing this is because France asked us. We’re still going to get bombed. They’re still going to come here and wreak havoc, whether we do this or not. Without having a good get-out plan or a way of drawing this to a conclusion, I see only an escalation of conflict, a massive potential for a head-on collision between Russia and the rest of the allied forces, this is one of the biggest fears I have. Russia has been testing airspace around the world. This Turkey thing is just the tip of the iceberg; of course Russia went into the airspace of Turkey, they do it all the time, and then Putin will play the, «Oh, look what these people have done» game, when he’s the architect of this challenge all the time, and to be out there in this situation where there are so many people with their fingers in the pie, it’s highly complex.
– Yes, it is. Do you think the people behind it all – and I’m not talking about the ones who are our supposed leaders – have an idea what they’re doing or do you think they’ve lost control of it as well?
– No, they’re just adding another piece to the patchwork quilt, getting us all further into shit. I’m fascinated by political debate, and I listen and I watch a lot, but I wouldn’t trust one of the fuckers, not one single one, and I wouldn’t vote for any of them.
– I have some sympathy with that point of view, being a keen student of politics. You try and have a discussion with most people about it and the moment you stray from anything that they recognise as what they’re told in the mainstream media, you suddenly become the crank, and they’re the ones who understand it all, apparently; it’s quite bizarre.
– Well, there you have another footnote for this album as well, because I don’t trust any of the institutions, any of our leaders, and everything I read or hear I take with a pinch of sale and the mainstream media don’t report what’s really going on in this world.
– I’ve got a sheet next to me of questions that I’ve written to ask you and I’ve triggered by what you’ve just said, when you were top of the pop charts with Kajagoogoo and so on, did you ever meet Jimmy Savile?
– Yes, I did.
– And what did you think of him?
– Well, as so many of us did, there were apocryphal stories going around, of paedophilia, the stories of necrophilia, they were rife everywhere but of course nobody had any proof, and everybody knew how powerful he was, and charismatic, and since that time, these things kept on coming and we’d always say, «How long’s it going to be until it comes out?» and after his death, there was this thing on the BBC saying he was a great man, and then it was all shut down, suddenly and we all looked at each other and said, «Here we go, get ready, eyes down, now comes the shit storm» and this is kind of a perfect example of numbers of subjects which are going to come out, not just about other people who’d done things like that, but things that have happened politically, things that have happened scientifically, around the world, where people go, «What about that?». Some people call it conspiracy theories.
– Haha. Yes
– Because you could have lumped all that Jimmy Savile thing in as conspiracy theory hogwash but there is no smoke without fire.
– I have a page bookmarked in my browser, under a heading called «Freedom», which is entitled, «33 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True». It tends to get quoted at people quite a lot because I hate the phrase «conspiracy theory»; there are theories and theories and theories and some of them involve conspiracies but it’s almost like Godwin’s law – where the first person to mention Hitler loses…
– I see what you mean. I would come at that from a different way and I tend to believe people who use the term «conspiracy theory» are people who believe what they are told.
– Fair point. So we’ve got quite a lot of that in the lyrical side of the album. There’s a theme running through there about what we’ve just been discussing. Musically, I don’t want to call it toploaded, because it’s not, but it develops musically as it goes along; songs like «Strange Relationship» and «Swimming Horses» are much more complex musically than the earlier tracks. Is that intentional?
– Yes. I wanted to make it accessible. I didn’t want to make it undigestible. Therefore I felt that to load it too much with complex musical concepts right from the outset was not really what the project was about, to be honest with you. It’s got to be song-led.
– I can’t believe you just used that phrase, I use it so often myself, being in a progressive rock band, I’m always trying to make songs for listeners, not music for musos. It’s all very well making music for musos but do so in the context of something that has a decent structure and is accessible to other people as well.
– Yeah, I mean a regular time signature has no use unless it’s yoked with some lyrical content or melodic idea that makes sense and that people can relate to.
– Yes, you played on the Lonely Robot album, didn’t you, «Please Come Home». (Reviewed here!) How chock full of hooks is that album?! John’s a great writer.
– Yeah.
– Yes, it is, yeah. No disrespect to The Mute Gods but that’s my album of the year.
– The Lonely Robot album?
– But back to The Mute Gods album (which is reviewed here!), it works well, because, exactly as you’ve said, you have these complex lyrical themes going on, that are decidedly non-trivial, but they’re set against a background, compared to some things that arrive later in the album, are in a more simple musical format, aren’t they? It’s a nice contrast.
– Yeah.
– You’re pleased with the album, I take it because you wouldn’t have released the third one, you’d have gone on and made a fourth if you hadn’t been?
– Yeah I figured that for the first statement from The Mute Gods it was suitable.
– I take it from that that you consider it an ongoing project?
– Yeah, I see it as a three album cycle and then after that I’ll rethink.
– Are you going to tour it as well?
– Only from the second record.
– Is that because of time pressures?
– I also need to know if there’s any interest. I’m happy with the record and I’m glad I’ve made it but if people don’t give an arse about it then…
– John said something very similar to me about Lonely Robot when I spoke to him earlier in the year. (Read that here!) He’s only now coming out and doing a couple of shows at the end of the year because he realises that there is an audience out there for it and people will turn up and really enjoy it.
– Yeah.
– So you have your daughter Lula singing on the last track. To me, it stands slightly out from the rest of the album.
– I think the record in general, the whole album, is quite mercurial. That track sits with a couple of others quite well – «Night School For Idiots» and also «Last Man On Earth». There’s three distinct moods on the record, there’s that mood and then the angrier, uptempo side to it…
– «Feed The Troll»? I love that…
– Yes, and the title track and «Your Dark Ideas». And then you’ve got other things like «Strange Relationship» and «Swimming Horses» that tend to be a little bit more «proggy», a little bit more complicated in their arrangement and also in their subject matter.
– You play with Steven Wilson live. Are you a fan of Porcupine Tree?
– Well, I’ve played quite a few Porcupine Tree tracks with Steve live but, to be honest with you, I don’t really know the material.
– Well there’s one track – it is «Feed The Troll» actually, which I feel actually is quite Porcupine Tree; that’s the closest it gets;
– Oh, really, which part?
– There’s just an atmospheric piece at some point in «Feed The Troll» where I just went, «Oh, that sounds like PT.»
– I’m interested to know. What part of PT does it remind you of?
– There’s just a twenty second segment in there that sounds like it could have been from some of their later stuff; it sounds like it could have come from «Fear Of A Blank Planet».
– Okay.
– I think overall there is something for a lot of people in this album.
– Okay.
– I’m on a group on Facebook – there are only 500 of us – we just listen to albums, we don’t listen to playlists, we don’t listen to things on shuffle; we sit down, quite often with vinyl and listen to albums and we just post artist, name of album, maybe a comment and sometimes a discussion ensues. I can imagine quite a lot of those people liking this album and hopefully the readers of Norway Rock will too.
– Yeah, well, you want people to like your stuff, don’t you? It’s all very well me being happy with it but you do want others to enjoy it too.
– Yeah, but if you lose sight though of the fact that you do it for yourself in the first place, then that’s not a good thing.
– No, that’s right.
– It comes across well. Was there anything else that you particularly wanted to say about the album?
– Not really. I think we covered everything, all the salient points. There are three videos – «Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me», «Feed The Troll» and «Father/Daughter» and I felt that between those three tracks you can sum up the record.
– I think that’s fair to say. It’s a nice cross-section of the album, isn’t it. So, are they getting released as whatever passes for a single these days?
– I’m not sure what does pass for a single these days. They’re not going to be released as individual tracks, but as promo clip, as lead tracks, as they tend to call them these days. I was asked to do a radio edit for «Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me».
– That one is quite long, isn’t it.
– Yes, but I resisted because I’ve spent too trying to pander to radio and I just thought, «If they want to play this track, they can play the parts they want to play of it».
– Well, yeah, when you’re writing something that is just verse/chorus/verse/chorus, it’s very easy to edit, but when you’re writing something that has a narrative, it’s not as simple, because you miss part of the story, don’t you.
– Yeah, and also I really like those long sequenced arpeggio sections where nothing much is happening, I really like that.
– And those are the things you’d end up cutting out.
– Yeah. I remember with Lifesigns we had to do a radio version of «Telephone» and I remember thinking, «I wish we hadn’t, I wish we’d just left it. Pink Floyd never did it.»
– I was actually supporting Lifesigns last night…
– What band do you play with?
– I sing in a band called Also Eden, I’m the guy who replaced Huw Lloyd-Jones back in 2010. Simon, the guitarist, and I, we do a duo version called Neo Deals, so we’ve opened up for them before and we did again at The Exchange in Bristol last night.
– How did it go?
– It was good fun but typically piss poor attendance, unfortunately. They all send their love, anyway.
– They’re good lads – I love that band.
– There are some similarities, I think, between certainly some of the longer tracks on The Mute Gods album and some of the Lifesigns stuff.
– Well, I suppose it would be inevitable really.
– So the album comes out in January, doesn’t it?
– Yes, the 22nd.
– Which I think is about when the next Norway Rock edition comes out so hopefully we’ll get something in the magazine.
– Well, thanks, Rich, and good luck with all your endeavours.
– And you with yours. Take care and thanks for calling.
Originally published in Norway Rock Magazine #1/2016