TEE "The Earth Explorer"

TEE is a five piece flute front progressive rock band from Tokyo, Japan. Their so-called 'European' sound is unique considering their far-east origin. The imaginative tunes with complex ensembles and rhythms will definitely catch the attention of prog lovers all over the world. Their sound will remind you bands like Camel, King Crimson, Asia Minor or even Frank Zappa on some parts. The band was formed in 2004 when... more

Kevin BARTLETT

You may not know his name but you have definitely heard his music more than once or twice in your life. Maybe on HBO, or on MTV, or on VH1, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel. Doesn't ring the bell? How about American Idol Rewind, or Dr. 90210? We had interviewed Kevin Bartlett a couple of years ago when his second solo album GLOW IN THE DARK was released. Bartlett has been quiet since that time but but he has been secretly brewing new projects. A few months ago he had put a new song...more

Peter Hammill, founding member of Van Der Graaf Generator, released his 28th solo album " nearly 3 months ago. He recently got back home from a short tour covering North America, Canada and Italy. In the 70's when bands like...more

FRIGHT PIG Barque At The Lune *** REVERSAL OF GRAVITY Scuba Gear ***

Interview with NICK BARRETT by Hande BURDG

Our current interview guest is Nick Barrett of Pendragon. He took the time out from his busy schedule to answer our questions.

TPF: Nick, fans find your latest album's sound heavier and darker than your previous albums, that is the sense you wanted to impart? Could you please tell us if there is a story behind it?

NB: Yes, the whole alum is about the difficulties growing up, particularly at the time when you are a teenager, I think when I was a teenager I wasn’t particularly angry, funnily enough that anger has come out now and I felt angry about the time when I was 15 which is a little bit weird, that seems to be the way it is. I think a lot of the things I’ve written about can also relate to people much older than just going through their teenage years initially the idea was about being held back and the difficulties we face around that period of time when we come out of childhood and want to make our mark on the world and the difficulties we have trying to break free of the constraints.

TPF: You have said something to the degree of “if people keep downloading your music illegally this might be your last CD”. Do you think it is your loyal fans mostly or just people who are looking for a free download who are downloading your music?

NB: I think it's people looking for a free download who are downloading it, you have got to kind of look at the overall picture here, it's no good me going on a witch hunt saying all downloaders should be burnt at the stake, not really moving forward with technology because some aspects of the internet, like you-tube and my space and just being able to put music on our website which are incredibly good promotion tools and we have to change the way we think a little bit about how we present the band but it’s the computer culture; it's not the same as home taping, it's sitting down most of the time in front of your computer, people who once bought records who probably have good jobs who now just simply don’t buy records because they know they can get them for free, if someone downloads our album before they buy it, if they have the intention of buying it, I have less of a problem with that even though it's still quite a strange scenario because the problem with an album is, it quite often takes more than 3 or 4 listens to get into and you are going to be missing a hell of a lot of great music just by downloading something; playing it once or twice and saying "I don’t like it". In the old days when we used to buy records because we used to pay money for them, we listened to them a lot. Like I bought Stevie Dante Against Nature and I bought it and played it once and didn’t like it... put it in the drawer and a year later I picked it up again and just the timing was right and I didn’t take it out my CD player for nearly 2 years. I just loved it and that whole process of learning an album and really getting to the heart of it is diluted by people downloading and making a decision there and then to buy it 9 times out of 10 if they can get it for free they are not going to be thinking about buying it unless they are collectors.

TPF: Fans in general agree that Not Of This World is both lyrically and musically one of your best works to date, following your divorce I think they find the songs are very much personal, do you agree with that?

NB: Yes I do, when I wrote the music and lyrics for Not Of This World it's probably the first time I thought emotionally I got down on record what I really was trying to say. The masquerade was more of a nuts and bolts album not necessarily a happier album but it wasn’t nearly as deep in fact nothing we have done to that point has been anything like as deep as personal as Not Of This World and a lot of people really related to that emotion, people who have been though the same thing really related to that particular album.

TPF: How did you start playing guitar and singing? Which came first or did they develop simultaneously?

NB: I used to sing when I was a tiny little kid, just used to sing along, my mum used to have the radio on and I was always hearing Beatles records. I used to sing along to those but really the guitar was the first thing I really worked on properly. I started when I was about 7, at first it was an acoustic guitar, just learnt a few songs and when I was 11 I was really keen on getting an electric guitar and actually performing rock and pop music then and then the singing thing came along later on because no-one else in Pendragon wanted to do it so it kind of landed in my lap really.

TPF: Do you think progressive rock or progressive music in general is a merry go round with bands still trying to imitate the 70’s Genesis or Yes or King Crimson sound? Why aren’t there very many musicians who are capable of stepping out of that particular sound? Do you agree it is an oxymoron to keep calling it prog when in practice all they do is to try and re-create the same atmosphere while adding a few odd time signatures here and there? What are your thoughts on this?

NB: Working backwards through your question, I think one of the strengths on Genesis was their time signatures happened by accident after they had written some of the melodies... so it’s the melodies that actually power the song along and the time signatures just happen to be coincidental. People have taken that and they now have a time signature of 13/8 then they try and ram some kind of melody into that and it doesn’t really work it's not that powerful. Genesis were absolutely the epitome of writing great strong melodies that just happen to be a bit quirky I don’t think many people have been able to copy that, I do think that a lot of the older kind of prog bands and I’m thinking of one in particular continues to keep churning out the same kind of Genesis sounding stuff I just don’t know why, even the sounds the bands use are not even forward thinking, there is so much scope out there nowadays, you can have Himalayan monks or yodellers, you can have so many different aspects in the music and styles as well anything from Classical right through to Thrash metal and jazz... all comes under the banner of prog rock you can do anything with this. I really think that some of these bands should be a lot more experimental in what they do and yes they are playing it safe. With a band like Pendragon our kind of safety net is our melody, my brief when I’m writing music is I want it to have emotion I want it to have feeling and I want it to have melody... without those it's not really Pendragon but within that framework there is a lot I can do to take it in different directions which is what I wanted to do with PURE.

TPF: How do you balance the business and artistic sides of music?

NB: Well the business side takes up a lot of time, it's really like an iceberg, what you see above the water is just the tip which is the band. The music, the stuff that goes on below the surface is the 99% that’s all the VAT accounts doing the accounts, booking the tour buses, making sure you have enough T-shirts, organising the road crew, making sure people turn up at the right time and place for rehearsals, making sure people have got copies of the music and lyrics before we start to rehearse, there are a million things that need to be done on a practical level to keep the band afloat. I do find it difficult to balance it out because I find when I’m doing business stuff I’m not doing very much music and vice versa, really the thing that tends to always suffer is I never spend enough time doing the music and I'd like to try and change that in the future so I’m going to farm out some of the accounting stuff and other logistics to other people.

TPF: Who were your biggest influences growing up?

NB: Initially the person I thought I wanted to be like was Mark Bolan from T-rex, in fact all the 70’s glam bands particularly Slade who were the first band that I saw live who were of any worth they were really quite heavy incredibly guitar and rock driven Node Holders connection with the audience was just staggering. I was 11 when I saw them, I was picking my sister up at a concert and we managed to get in I was completely blown away by this whole magical world of playing live on the stage and that was very influential, also people like Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, and the prog bands like Camel, Genesis, Pink Floyd and more recently bands like Radiohead, Black Field and some of the new metal grunge bands I like very much, I like the Foo Fighters but I also like a lot of melodic instrumental jazz people like Pat Matheny or Dave Gilmore's guitar playing Santana and I like a lot of classical music as well a lot of jazz stuff like Gary Burton it's great.

TPF: What is a typical song writing process for you?

NB: Usually starts off with a vague idea of what I want to write a song about, I quite often get a title which then can open a way for the style of music not necessarily always but it can, then perhaps I might get a few cords or a riff or some idea of where I want the music to start then it’s a building blocks process of getting some lyrics, sometimes they don’t fit in with that song but you keep them on the back burner maybe they fit for something else. You can have ideas in parallel but not with the idea that they are going to be for the same song, one year later suddenly they can marry up to be the same song, it's like mixing a cake, some of the ingredients get thrown in as you go along, hopefully at the end you have something good... it’s a very tough process writing, because you have to dig very deep to find new good ideas it also has to go through the quality control: "am I saying what I want to say in these lyrics, is this music different from the last time, does it have the melody and all the other things I have to think of?" It's very difficult writing.

TPF: Are there any new bands or artists that are impressing you these days?

NB: There are a couple, I really like Black Fields and I like a band called Airbags from Norway who are very good and also as I said I like modern bands I like Foo Fighters, so some of the new metal grungy bands, I like what they re doing, in terms of prog rock I've not really heard anything that I've been inspired by... there is a band Riverside from Poland who are very good but really from some of the old guards I've not heard anything very exciting to be honest.

TPF: The trend in the industry right now is for musicians to make up what they lack in CD sales by touring extensively, does this business model reflect Pendragon's response to illegal downloads and is it a viable option monetarily?

NB: It's not really a viable option, there are 3 tiers: the first tier is the big bands like Prince and Madonna who can go and play the stadiums and can gross millions, I mean Michael Jackson has just announced these 10 dates, 350,000 tickets have been sold within two hours for between £50 and £70 each. That’s a huge amount of money and we can't do that and neither can Fish neither can Marillion neither can all the other prog bands, because we are not big enough to be able to do that, the smaller bands might be able to get a few pub gigs and get £50 a night but bands like Pendragon are stuck in the middle, we don’t really make a huge amount of money from touring, if we play a place like Holland and make a percentage yes we make money but that money immediately goes to subsidise some of the shows on the tour where we make less money like the Czech republic or Italy. The last gig we played there or some of the gigs in France or some of the gigs in Germany subsiding those gigs, you could say only play Holland then but then you are not really moving forward or building, we took the album on tour to sell it directly to the public which financially was probably the best thing we could have done but we had to take a huge gamble with 30 odd tour dates that may not have broken even, its not substitute as I say there are 3 different layers in the whole downloading thing and we unfortunately are in the hardest area I think , we rely very heavily on our record sales and we cannot consider touring as a financial option.

TPF: What is the band doing lately? Will you be touring this year?

NB: We are bringing out a DVD which is out this March we are doing some festival dates we are doing Lorelei again in Germany which is great for us do to that. We are doing the Fish Convention in august in the UK and we are doing a number of dates dotted around Europe festivals mainly and then I really want to start work on a new album and some new stuff.

TPF: You guys tour heavily in Europe but do you ever have any plans to go overseas?

NB: If you mean coming to America then we will hopefully be coming over next year and we’ll be trying to get more dates in places like Canada and South America as well. It's not through not wanting to do it, its finding the promoters who are willing to stump up the cash to get us over there, if it wasn’t a financial problem we would be over there all the time.

TPF: Thank you very much Nick for answering our questions!

Visit Pendragon's website at: http://www.pendragon.mu/.

Visit Pendragon's Myspace page at: http://www.myspace.com/toffrecords.