7 July

July 7, 2014

I’ve been really grateful for all the positive comments about ADD. Thanks to everyone who’s bought the album and left feedback about it.

After such a long time living with the music and obsessively trying to make it what I wanted it to be, objectivity had long since departed. As such, I suffered plenty of trepidation regarding the potential reactions to what had become a year long labour of love for me.

The making of the album was a great experience and although the starting points and final say were mine, the likes of Steven Wilson, Stephen Bennett, Andrew Keeling, Colin Edwin, Pat Mastelotto, the no-man live band and others also deserve credit for making the finished material work as well as it did.

I hope that what came out was an honest summation of what I’ve done previously, but with occasional surprises that hinted at fresh possibilities ahead.

As I’ve said many times before, albums seem to have their own defining qualities and their own sense of momentum. They often become what they become in spite of artist intervention and this was very true of ADD. The album always seemed to possess a level of confidence and coherence whatever the circumstances involved in putting it together were. Generally speaking, things went right even when the situations suggested that failure was a more likely outcome.

The critical response, both from journalists and those who have bought the album, has been as good as I could have hoped for. One of my favourite emails regarding the album amusingly stated, “I got the Abandoned Dancehall that I ordered. It has the required melancholy. Thank you.” In response to that and other messages of goodwill, I can only say, my pleasure!

————

ADD reaching #18 in the official UK Rock chart was also genuinely pleasing.

Seeing my name improbably wedged between Linkin Park and Green Day felt a bit like coming across a photo of Emma Thompson out on the town with Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson, but it also felt like the original spirit of Tommy Vance’s Friday Rock Show was accurately being honoured.

For those of outside the UK (or too young to know), The Friday Rock Show was a popular BBC radio programme that started in the late 1970s. On an average show, Jefferson Airplane might be followed by a Kate Bush ballad, or a new Rush single would be preceded by Elvis Costello, or a knotty Robert Fripp instrumental. The incidental music came from the likes of Van Der Graaf Generator, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Stanley Clarke, there were innumerable Genesis and Pink Floyd specials (always a good thing!), and Folk, New Wave and Jazz Rock artists were played alongside emerging talents in the Metal and Progressive scenes. In retrospect, I realise that it was via Vance that I was introduced to enduring favourites of mine such as Sandy Denny, The Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa and Neil Young. I’ve never been a great radio listener, but in my early to late teens, along with John Peel’s equally eclectic show, the early episodes of The Friday Rock Show were an invaluable source of musical knowledge for me.

Holy procrastination Batman, I digress….

————

… and talking of digression, I’ve probably done more interviews over the last month than I’ve done in the last five years.

As always, I very quickly got to the stage where I felt I had little to say of any substance and that my rambling was in some way betraying the music (or at the very least had nothing to do with it). A melodramatic response perhaps, but I feel the best of me creatively is found in the music and lyrics and that most of my attempts to describe them are superfluous/nonsensical.

Email interviews (and Album Notes) are preferable to me as at least my thoughts are ordered and more succinct. The tendency to go off on meaningless tangents in real-time conversations constantly gets the better of me.

Despite that, there have been some good interviews published (Anil Prasad’s Innerviews epic, for example) and many of the conversations with journalists have been genuinely enjoyable. As it stands though, I am seriously considering not doing interviews for whatever I release next. My theory is that getting a cardboard cut-out of myself or randomly picking a stranger off the streets to answer the questions might produce equally satisfying results.

————

The rehearsals for the forthcoming shows went well.

As with no-man live, we’ve been playing to the strengths of the band rather than working on creating replicas of existing recordings.

The no-man material has developed in a way that echoes the 2012 live approach, while the ADD songs have translated into a live setting far better than I was expecting.

Colin Edwin and Myke Clifford’s involvement has given the material a looser feel compared with the Pete Morgan / Maestro Bingham combination (which worked really well in a more disciplined Minimalist Classical meets Post-Punk kind of way). Myke Clifford’s ‘Jazz hat’ may have provided an early clue as to his personal contribution!

The final rehearsal took place at Real World Studios and a day later we played a ‘secret gig’ as part of the Eppyfest in Stroud. All the band were relishing the prospect of seeing how the music worked with an audience rather than a solitary DAT machine in attendance and, luckily, the very nice and receptive crowd in Stroud made the hours spent in darkened rooms seem worthwhile. It was particularly good to see how the new tracks came alive in front of an audience. With two of the crowd doing a ballroom dance to the song section and the ’noise’ finale working as we’d hoped, Smiler At 50 generated the most positive response of an enjoyable evening.

I look forward to seeing some of you at the forthcoming shows. An experience awaits!

————

Listening:

Damon Albarn – Everyday Robots (2014)
Art Blakey – A Night In Tunisia (1960)
Kevin Coyne – Blame It On The Night (1974)
Eno / Hyde – High Life (2014)
King Crimson – Starless And Bible Black (1974)
Funkadelic – The Electric Spanking Of War Babies (1981)
Jon Hassell – City: Works Of Fiction (1990)
The Knells – The Knells (2013)
Joni Mitchell – For The Roses (1972)
Propaganda – A Secret Wish (1985)

Reading:

JG Ballard – The Atrocity Exhibition (1969)
Simon Gray – The Smoking Diaries (2004)