He may not be an ‘A’ list muso who gets ‘likes’ for farting, but he’s happy to declare himself as one of the last true believer of the hippy age. We’re in convo with Andy Tillison of The Tangent, who have just released To Follow Polaris with Andy taking up the challenge of being The Tangent ‘for one’.
So, The Tangent for one! Would it be fair to say that’s how all The Tangent albums begin their journey, with you at the helm, writing and setting up a demo?
You’re pretty much right there. That’s how they start with me reaching a point before I hand over to the rest of the band which is usually when I have something in place for guitars, bass, drums and wind. At that point I hand it over and ask the other guys to bring themselves to the project and do it properly! I don’t expect them to play exactly what I play but the only thing I ask is that they keep the flavour – if it’s a funky song I want it to stay funky. Essentially they put their mark on it. This time round I reached that point and then handed over to myself and out a bit more effort and care into the instruments I don’t normally play. That’s how it had to work.
So having handed over to yourself, you’ve admitted that you can’t simply replicate or play in the same way as Jonas, Luke, Theo, etc, so what have you learned over the years from them that you had to bring to the fore this time around?
Obviously I’m nowhere near as good on certain instruments as the other guys are but what I do have is forty years of recording experience that goes back to the middle of the Eighties when I ran a recording studio. So I might not know how to play the instruments very well, but I do really know what I want them to do! And also having worked so much with great musicians like Jonas, Steve, Luke and Theo, I was able to take into account the approach they might have taken and work out how I can do something like that within the music. Essentially, all I had to do was apply the time – so where Jonas might have taken thre takes, I did eighty takes – just gradually building it up so it became a bit like doing a painting and working on one bit to get that right. I also had to retain a bit of spirit so it was Rock and Rolling at the same time as taking all this care. It had to feel natural.
So were there any frustrations that emerged when your hands weren’t doing what your musical brain wanted them to do!?
Naturally it did and there were times when I was with the guitar or the bass and I was cursing to get it right, but again, these frustrations happen at all different moments in recording anyway. I often come across moments when I think “how can I do this?” and it goes right back to when I started and wanted to do something really ambitious but only had eight tracks of sound and no computers. It’s all led to me thinking about keeping a positive attitude and looking for a way to make something happen and that‘s something across all the records I’ve made and not just this.
Having listened to The Tangent over a number of years and across many albums, I have to say that despite being 20% of band, it sounds like an authentic Tangent record – which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given who’s made it!
It is a proper Tangent record because it basically operates within the parameters of what The Tangent is. It’s a Progressive Rock record with a core of Seventies Progressive Rock; it has its developments and inclusions of modern musical forms, so there’s stealth and hip hop, bits of dance music, funk and soul, which are all Tangent hallmarks. It’s got the social consciousness in the lyrics so in the end, I realised this is a Tangent record, not a solo record or anything else. It doesn’t do a band any harm to shake the tree once in a while, We’ve done twelve albums as a band but this time the band was me and next time everyone will be back.
As the writer, I’ll probably understand a bit more about how to leave spaces for the other musicians than I have before. I’ve learned more about the problems they face when dealing with my music as I found the same problems that Jonas would have found so maybe it’ll be better for him next time!
Just heading back to the Proxy album, the sleeve describes it as “a protest song, a reflection a couple of regrets and a rant” which all seem to fit the key ingredients for a Tangent album and which I guess could well apply to Polaris? Especially the brilliant rant in The Anachronism!
The Progressive world seems to be torn between whether they like my rants or not! They might sometimes think I’m some fire and brimstone breathing political activist but I’m just a cheerful bloke as you can probably tell! But I do like to dwell on the problems of the world we live in; the injustices, the unfairness and exploitation and all those horrible things, but I try to whip up an album that takes those things into account and protests against them but still has an optimistic view of life and the goodness in the world. If you just think “it’s political, it’s miserable” you’re missing out as it’s not all politics, but searching for something better than what we have. Nothing wrong with doing that ever.
It’s The Anachronism that picks up a few things on which to have a good old rant….
We’re coming up to a year of many elections all over the place and looking at the candidates around the world, I can’t see any candidates who are going to provide an outcome that I think is great. There’s nowhere I can see me thinking “wouldn’t it be great if they won” – although it would be very good if _______ didn’t win! But it’s that complete con that people call democracy that we have a right to choose, but as I say in the song, going to a school and putting an ‘X’ in a box, that isn’t democracy – it’s just a ritual and me, like millions of others, I’ll go and put my ‘X’ in the box knowing my candidate won’t be chosen because a certain party will always win here and that means my vote counted for nothing. Like wheat and chaff, my vote is the chaff and just gets thrown away, my vote hasn’t counted, but I will go and have my say!
That could be what you suggest on A Like In The Darkness where you’re questioning and doubting what impact you have, measuring success in the currency of ‘likes’, or what difference you make as a musician and why you do what you do?
I think that’s it and a question that many artists ask themselves. This one was for me – I was out walking the dog on a cold and foggy night when the fog cleared just enough for me to see my studio light shining out into the darkness and of course the light I saw out there was the very light in this very room now. When I’m here in this room (it’s one where Andy is surrounded by an assortment of musical instruments and gadgets), I wonder if anything I do in here is going to affect anybody. Years ago I made an album called The Time Capsule where I looked at the room I was standing in, thinking that everything – and I mean everything – in the universe is outside this room and you suddenly wonder what possible effect can be had on the world by what you do in this room! In the end, the song, A Like In The Darkness is really me going through that dark period when you’re alone and recording and halfway into an album that won’t see the light of day for another year and a half and you wonder if there’s a point to all this. Is me singing about Putin going to stop a single bomb being sent?
I tie that with the way the Internet works. You post something and nobody comes back to you. I’m not an ‘A’ list musician who gets ‘likes’ for farting but it’s just a case of ‘Is there anybody listening’ and ‘does it make a difference’? And of course the answer is ‘yes’ – a very small difference – but the point is that it’s a lot of people making a small difference and so it’s worth doing. That’s the conclusion. My little collection of observations can be added to Boff Whalley’s collection and to Paul Weller’s and Thom Yorke’s and all the way up to Taylor Swift. A lot of people saying good things – I’m the last of the true believers of the hippy age! And I kept my hair!
The Internet has certainly changed music in a number of ways and thinking about how the mystique of the God-like status of the Rock Star might have been lost with the accessibility of musicians now.
The mystique has definitely been lost but it’s not something that worries me. I never wanted to be ‘like them’ particularly – a lot of them back at the time were like Medieval princes riding through towns causing chaos and destruction. Some of the thngs they must have got up to! They’d just left their teens and on their way to being millionaires and worshipped by lots of people. I always thought the age of the Rock and Roll star is to all intents and purposes, all over. It’s certainly not as prevalent a commodity as it used to be as there’s a lot to compete with it. There’s so much entertainment that the days when Rock and Roll was the only thing available (on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the Summer!) has given way to a million and one things you can do!
Now that some of those big Rock star personalities like Wakeman and Emerson, to pick out two names in the Prog keyboard field, are in their career twilight or even no longer with us, what or who do you see as the future from Progressive music and its stars of the future?
It’s a question of if there’s enough interest amongst the younger musicians to continue working in this area, then, for example, I’ve worked in the past couple of years with a remarkable Canadian band called The Anchoret. I played keyboards on all but one of the tracks on their album. I’m so much older than them that they call me ‘Gandalf’ which I don’t mind as I’ve always liked Gandalf, but what they’ve created is a record that’s about them and what they like and what influences them. Some of those influences come from very technical and heavy Metal but as well as that they wanted to have elements of other bands they liked which would probably include King Crimson and Pink Floyd and they really did go for it. I’ve heard quite a lot of Prog Metal albums where usually the keyboard player usually gets to play a few dull sounds in the background and make atmospherics and drones and that; these guys let me play organs and solos and flying synths and piano cascades and they kept it!! I thought “this is all going to end up on the studio floor,” as I’ve done this kind of thing before but these guys kept the lot and it sounds amazing! All they need to do now is find someone who’s still alive in thirty year’s time and that will be a really great keyboard job!
I’ve enjoyed technical Metal since the mid Eighties when I got into a band called Voivod who are also from Canada. Their album Dimension Hatröss is one of my most played albums of all time. I wore a copy of it out but I’ve liked that record for forty year’s which is amazing.
See what Andy means about The Anchoret…:
But while the likes of PROG magazine continue their coverage of the classic bands who might be in their twilight of their careers, they also find space to push new bands and maybe the beauty of the world wide web is that younger bands in general have the opportunity to get their music in the public domain (and hope it gets heard!)
I think in the end the future of Progressive Rock music isn’t going to be decided by me or anyone else my age, but essentially The Tangent did make a conscious choice to be a retro Progressive Rock band and our first two, maybe three, albums did follow that path. After that, I started to think about not doing this forever, but continue and build on it and bring in different sources from different places and I think we’ve done that alright. We’ve gone through Punk Rock, Metal and Soul; we’ve had Funk, EDM and mixed them all together within the core of the Prog Rock things. Maybe slightly more than us, Porcupine Tree have pushed the boundaries out, but we’re who we are, they’re who they are, Big Big Train are who they are and in the end it’s going to be a choice. If younger people decide they want to make music like this, they will and define Progressive music for another generation.
Here I am at 64 and a lot of the music I listen to was made by 21 year olds who are now my age! So I have no problem listening to new music by people who are 21 – and checking bands like Knower and a band called Dirty Loops who are an astonishing pop group who play straight out pop music but with the dexterity of Rush! Those people really inspire me and make me want to do something that’s like that.
One thing we wanted to ask was how I was talking to a band new to the Inside Out label who were particularly (and pleasantly) surprised by the way the label let them get on with doing the music without interference. When you proposed doing The Tangent (for one) was there a similar freedom and blessing to go with what you wanted to do?
To me Inside Out have been artistically transparent ever since I started working with them which has been for a third of my life. I’ve made 13 studio and 2 live albums and at no point have they ever censored a song or a lyric. The only thing they did was make one request in 2007. We did a book with a cartoon strip in which was a picture of Sid Vicious who I actually met and the cartoon strip was of that moment and he was in a swastika shirt. The label wrote me a polite letter that said they would like me to remove it but they were not going to tell me to. Based on the fact that they let me have total say in what I did and that there was the issue of sensitivity, I asked the artist to just change it to an anarchy symbol. An artist could not have found a better home than I have.
And finally while the Zoom clock ticks down, as we’ve been speaking of observational rants, a personal favourite Tangent track is Supper’s Off – which was a bonus track on Proxy. Only recently did I discover a ‘new’/alternative version with a great verse about “watching Yes at QPR”…
That’s the original version. In the official version there’s the “they going running back to the Seventies and all the other bands are skint” but in that version it was “they all go running back to Genesis…” It wasn’t anything to do with Inside Out censoring it, but more to do with Jonas who by this point was playing in Steve Hackett’s band, so it didn’t quite seem fair on him! Yes at QPR – it made me wonder what happened to all those people watching the ban din a football ground and why they don’t all go to the gigs that we do or the current Yes do!
And talking of the how the presentation and technology has advanced since Yes at QPR in 1875, Andy’s parting shot is:
I still maintain to this day that I saved The Flower Kings’ lives once when they were having problems with their equipment and I found out that somebody on the technical side had plugged the entire band and the light show and the PA system into the same socket by mistake. I followed these wires into this extension that went into one socket that had caught fire so it was a quick case of pulling out the plug!
Here’s Supper’s Off (with that Yes at QPR variation!):
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