January 2025
“It’s a natural thing” is a phrase Dave Greenslade repeatedly uses to describe various happenings his long career was strewn with – still, isn’t it the most telling sign of a great talent: to accept what occurs due to the person’s own subconscious processes as something that’s par for the course? Of course, the venerated ivories-driver’s love for nature, which got manifested in quite a few pieces Greenslade composed over the years, and his spell with a band called NATURE seem purely coincidental in such a context, but Dave’s conceptual thinking – the cornerstone of the albums he recorded with COLOSSEUM and GREENSLADE as well as the veteran’s solo oeuvre – doesn’t feel like a matter of happenstance.
Having created an enviable body of work with those ensembles in the ’70s and picking up where they left off a quarter-century down the line, Greenslade all but retired ten years ago, yet recently he joined forces with the other Dave, Thomas, to add one more entry to his impressive discography – and there’s new music in the pipeline. It’s time to look back, then, in order to prepare ourselves for the future, and it’s time we finally spoke with the legendary keyboard player who, unlike many of his peers, holds no grudges and remains as good-humored – and good-natured – as he used to be at the beginning of the journey we discussed at some length.
– Dave, why do you think keyboard players like yourself and, say, Brian Auger, who come from a rhythm-and-blues and jazz background are less celebrated than prog musicians such as Rick Wakeman?
This is a good question and one I can’t really answer, except that I think that the music that I’ve played has never really belonged to any kind of fashion: I just move from one kind of music to another. When I formed GREENSLADE, for instance, I didn’t form a progressive rock band; I just formed a band. The journalists suddenly started to say it was prog, but I never knew anything about that. I just wanted to play music that I liked and that I could compose. So it’s other people who call you something, who give you labels, if you like, and give you the popularity, you don’t do it yourself. And if people don’t talk about me, at least they’re not saying anything nasty about me. (Laughs.) I don’t mind, man. But when people say, “Oh, I love your albums and I love this piece of music and that piece,” I’m very flattered. I enjoy that very much, but I’m not looking to be a star. I’ve never looked for that. All I wanted to do was play music – and I was very fortunate that I’m able to do that even up to eighty-two. I’ve been playing professionally since I was about nineteen or twenty, so that’s sixty-odd years of making a living from something I really enjoy. Not many people can say that!
– And still, one of your early bands was called THE DAVE GREENSLADE TRIO, so you must have wanted your name to be known!
Oh, that’s true. But I was only about fourteen when I had that band with Jon Hiseman, who was thirteen years old, on drums, and Tony Reeves, who was fourteen as well, on double bass. So that was the only stardom I ever had, really. (Laughs.) We used to go to “Ronnie Scott’s Club” in London and see people like Bill Evans, who is my favorite piano player – there’s a lot of great piano players out there, but Bill was the one for me, and if could be anywhere near as good as him, I would have been happy. That was what I wanted. I met him once, in the street outside “Ronnie Scott’s” when I went to see him. He was on a break, and I had the nerve to go up to him and say, “Bill, I really love your playing.” And he was very sweet, he said, in a small voice, “Thank you very much, man”: that was it for me.
– Did you see yourself, at least then, as a piano player rather than an organist?
A piano player. I started as a piano player, playing kind of jazz – well, my idea of jazz, as I didn’t really know what I was doing, but people accepted it. And we did all right. We did quite a lot of gigs, all semi-pro stuff, youth clubs and so on. But then I started to play organ in a band called THE WES MINSTER FIVE with Jon and Tony, so things started to get more busy. I was playing five nights a week and also doing a day job in an office – doing boring office work to make the money – but in the end, I had to give one up or the other up, and one night in “The Flamingo” where we used to play quite a lot this Moroccan guy came up to me and said he was a big star in Casablanca and he was putting a band together in London to go back home and do a tour. Would I like to come and play organ? I thought this was a wonderful opportunity to get rid of my day job, so I went to Casablanca and spent three months playing with two guys from Gene Vincent’s BLUE CAPS, guitarist Bobby and bassist Clive, Carl Dakin on drums, and this famous Moroccan singer, Teddy Raye his name was, in front. It was great fun and it allowed me to go and play professionally, so it was marvelous. We toured all over Morocco: in Marrakesh, Fes, Meknes…
– So you actually rocked the casbah!
Exactly! (Laughs.) I played the casbah everywhere and it was great! After that, I went to Paris, and the four of us – not with Teddy Ray, but the four musicians in the band – got a residency in a very nice club in rue de Rennes, called “The Keur Samba”; we played there for two or three months for good money, but eventually, I got back to London and went to see a guy I knew in Wardour Street, who owned the clubs. I asked if anybody wanted a keyboard player – I was really lucky, man! I was in the right place at the right time, which is a rare thing! – and he said, “Yeah, Chris Farlowe is looking for one.” Chris was holding an audition in a “Klooks Kleek” club in North London, so I went along. There were lots of other keyboard players, I saw them play and then I got up and played. Within ten minutes, Chris turned around to me and said, “You can stay there all night if you like!” I stayed for three years, with Chris singing and Albert Lee, a wonderful guitar player with the most fantastic technique, possibly one of the best in the world. We would play these songs with a lot of solos involved. Chris has got a wonderful voice, he’s a very natural performer, and Albert knocked me out every night, because every night everything was different, as he didn’t stick with one formula and just played beautiful music. He lived in South London, as I did, so sometimes we used to go to the gigs together… but I haven’t seen him for a long time.
– But you moved on to Geno Washington anyway.
Yes. I was headhunted by Geno Washington’s band leader, Clive Burrows, and asked to join THE RAM JAM BAND, which I did because I was getting a little bit bored with the Chris Farlowe thing and I wanted a change. Also, they were giving me a lot more money, and I needed a bit more. as I was buying a new Hammond organ and a car, and they were not cheap. So I joined Geno, but only for eighteen months, and I was very pleased to get a phone call from my childhood friend Jon Hiseman who was forming a band.
– And the core of Jon’s band, COLOSSEUM, were the same people who played in THE DAVE GREENSLADE TRIO. Was there any shift of power?
Just a little bit. (Laughs.) But it seemed absolutely right from day one. Jon was a natural leader and a dear friend. It was very sad that he died so early, I miss him terribly. Another dear friend in that band, who is sorely missed, is Dick Heckstall-Smith. Dick was a lovely man, and we wrote a lot together. We wrote “Lost Angeles” together, in Los Angeles.
– How important was friendship for the dynamic within the band?
The two things went together: friendship was important, but somehow there was a kind of bond because of the music, and that’s why we all got on really well. We didn’t have any conflicts – we had differences of opinion, which is quite healthy, about material, for instance: whether we were going to play this or play that. But COLOSSEUM was the start of my composition career. We had a blank canvas with nothing on it when we started, and we didn’t want to play covers, so Jon, being a leader, said, “Right, Dave, you’ve got to start writing!” He kicked me up the bum, as it were, and I’m very grateful for that, because it was natural for a keyboard player to start writing music, so I did. I loved it, and I have not stopped.
– Was it a big responsibility to be a main composer for the band?
Yeah, it was. But it was very enjoyable. I took to it like a duck to water, and I was very pleased that other people liked what I wrote, compositions like "The Valentyne Suite" and “Lost Angeles” or “Come Right Back” and “No Pleasin'”… We had a great three years from 1968 to 1971.
– How did it feel to be working with musicians who could do justice to your music?
I was very fortunate to have some very talented people around me and very pleased to be there. It was being in the right place at the right time again.
– How much attention did you give to the band’s harmonies? I mean, you played more than one keyboard and Dick played two saxes at once, while on the likes of “Tanglewood ’63” Chris and Clem Clempson and Mark Clarke vocalized together.
Well, as we all know, music has lots of layers, and if I’ve got two keyboards in front of me I can explore different colors in each one. And when Dick would play the soprano and the tenor at the same time, it was quite a sight as well. It’s just exploring things and taking things on almost subconsciously: you just explore as you go, and some things work and some things don’t. You soon find out which don’t, so you drop them from the set and move on. By being a musician, you have to be broad-minded, you have to see things slightly differently than everyday stuff.
– Talking about the subconscious and broad-minded… It’s obvious that COLOSSEUM’s “Beware The Ides Of March” is based on “Bach’s Air on the G String” as is PROCOL HARUM‘s “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”: you must have known that there would be comparisons and you didn’t care. Was it a deliberate joke on your part?
I didn’t care about what anybody else thought. It’s such a beautiful chord sequence that we couldn’t resist it: it lends itself to experiment around it, which we did, I think, quite successfully. We didn’t feel that we were stealing anything; we felt that we were embellishing, if you like, extending the piece, and it went down very well for a period of time.
– Since we touched on Bach, I have to ask: you didn’t really have this academic, classical, symphonic education, did you?
No, I didn’t. But my mother was a very sensitive musician, a very fine singer and pianist who sang in the local church choir and did many solo performances, and my father was a pianist and had a piano, so I was playing a lot at home. And I had piano lessons – only for six months! – when I was about seven or eight years old. My teacher was Austrian, living in England, and I really loved her teaching. She even started to teach me as a young boy the rudiments of conducting. She wanted to do that, so I think she saw something in me, I don’t quite know what. I was very unhappy when she had to go back to Austria to get married, and I never had any more lessons at all, as I didn’t want to go to anybody else. So after those six months, I just taught myself. So no, I never had any academic training. But I just carried on learning – and learning by meeting wonderful people like Jon and Tony, and Dick, and so on. And then we all learned by listening to so many other people: I used to love Dave Brubeck, John Lewis in THE MODERN JAZZ QUARTET and people like that.
– Well, that’s jazz, whereas large-scale pieces like “The Valentyne Suite” take not only technique but also a deep knowledge of classical composition. You taught yourself everything?
Yeah, I didn’t have any deep knowledge of anything at all, it was all in there. (Smiles and points to his temple.) I never learned anything like that from anybody else, not consciously. No, it just came to me very naturally, and I felt very natural with what I played. “The Valentyne Suite” started as sketches. The main slow section – the middle section, “February’s Valentyne” – I composed all in one go, and I have no idea where that chord sequence came from.
– You recorded a piano version of it on your "Routes-Roots" album. Did you write it on the acoustic instrument?
I wrote it mostly on organ – well, it was a mix of organ and piano mix – but commercially, I played it on organ. Again, it was the natural thing to do.
– And then, when you stitched everything together, did you sit and marvel at your own creation?
No. You see, the thing about putting it all together, this is where people like Jon Hiseman came in. He was a great arranger and leader. I would come up with these compositions, and he had a wonderful knack of saying, “Yeah, well, that was great, Dave, but I think we should move to that section now. We should try this and try that. Let’s play it like this…” He had a great vision, so between the two of us it seemed to work: I’ll get the original composition, and he would sometimes kick it into shape. And I mean kick it into shape.
– The “Transmissions” box set contains quite a few drastically different versions of what would end up on the band’s albums, like an instrumental take on “The Machine Demands A Sacrifice” or songs with Clem’s vocals instead of Chris’. Did you feel bold enough to experiment in public before going to the studio – I mean going to the BBC as opposed to a regular concert?
Yes, oh yes. You’ve got to take courage in your hands and just do it, you know. A lot of these pieces we would play on the road before we got anywhere near the studio: it’s a good way to rehearse them for recording which was very expensive. And anyway, we needed new ways of presenting our music every time we were asked to go and play somewhere. You can’t play the same things every time in the different concert halls. So it made sense and it all felt very natural.
– But was “The Machine Demands A Sacrifice” originally written as an instrumental before you thought about a vocal line?
No, it was actually written as a structure for Jon’s drum solo. We needed a piece of music to bring it in and a piece of music to take it out, and that’s what “The Machine Demands A Sacrifice” was there for. But of course, it expanded and became a great piece when Chris Farlowe began singing it.
– Was it difficult to convince Chris to join the band? He was a star in his own right but, because a big sound required a big voice and a free vocalist, you came over and said, “Be one of us, rank and file”?
Exactly, exactly. The thing was, Clem was doing a great job singing in COLOSSEUM, but the band was getting more and more powerful, and with Jon in the driving seat as a drummer, all the compositions were getting bigger and more adventurous, so we needed a stronger voice at the front. And because I’d worked with Chris Farlowe in THE THUNDERBIRDS, I suggested to Jon that I asked Chris to join us. I asked him and he said “Yes” – straight away. It was very easy and it was amazing! He was a big star, a big voice and a big heart – a good man – and he fitted in beautifully.

(from the top) Jon Hiseman, Tony Reeves, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Dave Greenslade, James Litherland
– The title track of the band’s first album with Chris, “Daughter Of Time”: were the strings on it real or played on a Mellotron?
I think it was a mixture of both, actually. I think I started experimenting with the Mellotron at the time, and we worked with a string section as well.
– One of this song’s writers was Barry Dennen, who we know from the “Jesus Christ Superstar” album. How did he come into the picture?
One of the other guys, I can’t remember who, knew Barry, and Barry wrote really good lyrics: that was his contribution.
– And while we’re on the subject of credits, tell me please: didn’t you feel like shooting yourselves in the leg in terms of royalties by releasing the "Live" album with only one of the band’s compositions?
No, no, it didn’t matter. We didn’t worry about royalties. (Laughs.) Because of all our other compositions on the other records, the main thing with the live one was to make a really interesting, fun piece of work. And I think it worked: a lot of people said that was our best album.
– How instrumental was Gerry Bron in what you were doing in terms of production?
Gerry was a very nice man, a real gentleman. I really liked him and we got on very well. He was the head of Bron Records and the agency that we worked through, but he wasn’t so much of a producer. He seemed to be a kind of guiding light behind us, and he took care of all the business, which was very important, because I didn’t want to know anything about business – I had enough to do to look after music.
– The band broke up a few months after the live album was released. As Jon said to me, “We were finished, we could only repeat after that, which is why I stopped it”; but when I spoke to Gerry, he suggested you should have replaced Clem and soldier on. What’s your take on this?
Gerry actually said to me, “No, you just get another guitar player in and carry on!” but Jon didn’t see it like that. Clem had been asked to join HUMBLE PIE to replace Peter Frampton, and Jon couldn’t face going through days of auditions for guitarists. The first time around, when we first formed, we had three days of auditioning – it was a marathon before we chose James Litherland – so when Clem left, Jon could see this big, big problem of replacing him. That’s really why we broke up. And when that happened, I thought the only thing I could do was to form my own band. Why not?
– But what about “Upon Tomorrow”? Did COLOSSEUM started recording another album only to leave it unfinished?
Yes. A lot of us didn’t like the album. We just didn’t like it, and that was another reason why we split up. We were starting to fall apart musically, if you like.
– So you formed GREENSLADE at the end of 1972, so you had a gap year, and during that time you toured with IF, correct?
That’s right. They asked me to do a tour. It was great fun, working with [reedmen] Dick Morrissey, Dave Quincy and Terry Smith on guitar. We went to Italy for ten days, and I really enjoyed it: good food, good band. They were good guys to be with. They wanted me to go with them to America, their manager asked me to, but I didn’t want to do that, because I was getting married, and I would have got into big trouble if I’d have gone there. (Laughs.) I got married – we were together for thirty years, my wife and I, and we are still friends – and then I had to think about what to do. It took me a year to get GREENSLADE together because I had to write new material.
– There is an interesting concert recording that I listened to recently: looks like you toured, not only with IF but also with a group called NATURE.
Ah, yes. They were Danish.
– Swedish.
Yes. I don’t remember how it happened, though – it was an accident.
– One piece on this live album is credited to you, it’s called “Mr. Monroe”: did you write it for that band or for some other project?
I remember that piece. I must have written it for them. It’s an instrumental, isn’t it?

Chris Farlowe, Clem Clempson, Jon Hiseman, Mark Clarke, Dave Greenslade, Dick Heckstall-Smith
– Yes. So you must have spent quite a lot of time with them?
No, it was all very quick. I just went and toured with them. It was great fun, they were great musicians, especially guitarist, Lasse Wellander. But I had to find a new way forward as a permanent thing.
– And that permanent thing was a two-keyboards situation, but not like PROCOL HARUM, right? They had Gary Brooker solely on piano and guys like Matthew Fisher on organ, while both you and Dave Lawson played all the ivories.
That’s right. Only we didn’t consciously think of being different from anybody else; we just wanted to make music together. I came up with the idea of having a second keyboard player because I had so many ways of playing my compositions that I couldn’t possibly do it myself. I’ve only got two hands! (Laughs.) So I found a very talented keyboard player who I’m still in touch with. Dave Lawson is a wonderful player.
– Was it liberating to have many keyboards and four hands at your disposal and be able to work out complete arrangements?
Yeah. Between Dave Lawson and myself, we had six or seven keyboards – we had the whole orchestra at our fingertips and we used it pretty well.
– If somebody came into the room where the two of you were and called for Dave, who would be the first to respond?
Well, we both did. There was a lot of confusion, but it seemed to work. Thank goodness we had an Andy [McCulloch] on drums and a Tony on bass, so that was okay! (Laughs.)
– When you formed GREENSLADE, did you try to tone down COLOSSEUM’s jazz leanings?
No, that’s the way it worked. I don’t know where our style came from but it just landed in my lap, and we developed it. But you’re right: it was less jazzy. Dave Lawson wasn’t particularly into jazz – he had more of a classical mind, although he could play anything. But while there were slightly different influences, we had to get writing, because I managed to get a record deal with Warner Brothers for four albums.
– How much of your first album was carried over from COLOSSEUM?
Nothing – but it was there in the back of my head, probably. I used things I had learned in COLOSSEUM the first time around, but I couldn’t consciously tell you what they were. As you said, the compositions were slightly different with GREENSLADE, but luckily, they became very popular.
– How did you divide your sonic duties with Dave? Would it be too simplistic to say that you were responsible for blues component and he for baroque elements?
Yes, it would be too simplistic. It all became a big, big, big heap, and it just fell naturally to Dave to play this part and to me to play that part, it was another natural set of situations, like in COLOSSEUM, so we didn’t have any problems at all.
– On “Bedside Manners Are Extra” – on pieces like “Sunkissed You’re Not” and “Chalkhill” – the band seemed to be moving towards fusion. Did you begin to listen to MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA or RETURN TO FOREVER?
Well, I did like MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA. Johnny McLaughlin, wasn’t it? It was great stuff, and I suppose everybody was moving along with that music. But there was a lot of music around at that time, and a lot of it I ignored, because we would only play things that we felt very natural with. Quite frankly, I didn’t have a lot of time to listen to music because I was too busy making it.
– Were you, when making music, fascinated with this oriental, pentatonic scale? I mean you wrote “Mandarin” for COLOSSEUM based on this, “Temple Song” for GREENSLADE.
I think you can actually blame Tony Reeves for this. That particular part of things came from him, but he didn’t write the whole piece. He would present a pentatonic scale to me and I’d have to write a tune for it.
– People used to complain about the weight of Hammonds, so I assume there was another aspect of having two keyboard players in the band: how much did you have to haul on tour in terms of kilograms?
A lot. We had Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer Piano, Hammond, Mellotron, all sorts of stuff, so it must have been like moving a music shop. It must have been a nightmare for the road crew, but they never complained because they were good guys.
– You started touring right away, before you went into the studio. Quite unusual for a band who played this kind of music. You decided to road-test it?
Yeah, of course, we wanted to see if it was going to work with an audience. We were offered some dates in Germany, because we knew people there from COLOSSEUM days, so I thought it was a good way of road-testing, as you say, the GREENSLADE material.
– And what was the public’s reaction to your music?
Horror. (Laughs.) No, they obviously enjoyed it because we managed to go and make four albums, and it was all good fun – and hard work too.
– But you toured with Rory Gallagher, and his audience must have been completely different from yours.
Yes, I know. That was a real surprise. This was suggested because the office had Rory touring and we needed somewhere to start off, so we supported him. But it went great. Rory was a lovely man, I liked him very much. And he was very helpful, very friendly. Touring with all those keyboards as a support band, you would not be treated very well in a lot of situations. I did some gigs with KRAFTWERK, and I didn’t get on with them at all. And they didn’t like us. We had very little time before each gig to sort our keyboards out and to do soundchecks, and they were not very generous, if you know what I mean. But Rory was quite different. He said, “Take as long as you need!” and so on and so forth.
– 1974’s “Spyglass Guest” was a bit different from 1973’s “Greenslade” and “Bedside Manners”: you and Dave wrote it separately and you were said to not have even played on his pieces. Was that so?
Yeah, that’s right. He wrote a couple of pieces that didn’t actually require the second keyboard. This is another thing that musicians have to make decisions about: to not overdo it. If you don’t need to do this, if it works the way it is, don’t change it. Don’t. And it worked beautifully with Dave’s compositions: “Red Light” and one or two other pieces worked perfectly with his keyboards and gave me a rest. (Laughs.)
– You decided to do so even though the band bore your name?
Yes, but to not play on one or two tracks, it didn’t matter. That’s why I’m saying it’s not precious: whatever works within the band works.
– And then, you brought Clem in for “Spyglass Guest”: so not everything was to be minimal?
It’s because, as you say, the material was starting to get a bit more rocky again. It was moving. Plus, Andrew McCulloch was a wonderful drummer who played in such a way that it was fine to bring a guitar player in because he could handle that too really well.
– Talking about Andy, you had a cymbal on the cover of that album. What did it mean?
That’s a question I can’t really answer. I can’t remember the details, but I think Andy McCulloch had something to do with that. (Laughs.)
– Do you remember why did you ask your roadie Jeremy Ensor to be a co-producer for the album?
We worked with him for a long time and we knew that he had a good set of ears, so we thought it would be a good idea. Another set of good ears when you’re making an album is not a bad thing, and he was the right man to come and help in that direction.
– Another interesting thing about “Spyglass Guest” is that it ends with another version of “Theme For An Imaginary Western” which you used to play in COLOSSEUM. Of course, Dick and Jon played on Jack Bruce’s album with this song, but did you want to try it in a different setting?
The thing is that, as you know, most of the material in GREENSLADE and COLOSSEUM was original, but there were one or two songs that all of us respected and loved, and Jack ‘s “Theme For An Imaginary Western” was one of them, so we wanted to play it. And when it came to GREENSLADE, I wanted to play it with those guys, too, because it was such a fabulous song, and it still remains one of my favorites.
– What that album, and “Time And Tide” that followed it, didn’t have was a Roger Dean cover artwork. His Shiva-like character represented two keyboard players…
That was my idea. Roger was there when we were rehearsing, and we were talking about album covers, so I just said to him, “Well, there’s a man with many arms playing all these keyboards,” and I did a little sketch on the back of a menu in the pub. He went away and turned it into that wonderful man that became the symbol for GREENSLADE which was exactly Lawson and myself and hundreds of other keyboard players.
– But why did Roger call it The Hermit?
I’ve no idea. You’ll have to ask Roger that. Probably because some of those pictures looked that man was living on his own in a cave, wasn’t he?
– So you abandoned him for two albums and returned to him on the "Cactus Choir" LP. Why? To demonstrate continuity?
He was the only one left, so at least I brought the man with me, even if the band wasn’t there. (Laughs.)
– How did the band’s dynamic change on “Time And Tide” after Tony left and Martin Briley came along?
Yes, Tony went off to do more production work elsewhere. He had been a very much a frontline bass player, as you can hear on “Mandarin” and all those things, while Martin was more of a conventional bass player, and very good he was too – and he was quite happy being a very good bass player. But the flamboyance of Tony was not there, so I suppose we had to write in a slightly different way.
– There seems to be more piano on “Time And Tide” than on the other albums. You wanted to highlight this acoustic element?
No, I think it works the other way around. If you compose a piece of music, the music will tell you what is the right way of playing – normally, you can hear it straight away: that should be on a Hammond, that theme should be on an acoustic piano, that should be on a vibraphone. Normally, it comes to you very easily. So that’s the only reason.
– For all its variety, “Time And Tide” was a concept album.
Yes. If you’re working on one album, you’re bound to have a glue and adhesive with pieces naturally flowing, and therefore they sound like a concept, even if it didn’t start out to be one. It’s just a natural process. And some of them end up as being obvious concepts and others, accidental concepts.
– After that LP, the band broke up, yet unlike many other guys you worked with, you didn’t play a lot of sessions. You played for Tony Hazzard, though.
Yeah, I did. Nice man, Tony – a good songwriter, too, very different from GREENSLADE and COLOSSEUM. He asked me to play on a couple of his records [1971’s “Loudwater House” and 1973’s “Was That Alright Then?”], and then he was on the road and he needed a keyboard player, so I actually did some gigs with him as well.
– You has also played a couple of gigs, together with Jon and Dick, with Neil Ardley.
Oh, yes, with THE NEW JAZZ ORCHESTRA. It was lovely playing with a big band. Neil knew Jon and Dick: that’s how that came about.
– So once GREENSLADE stopped, you went solo.
Right – and I have a little story about “Cactus Choir” that I’d like to tell. When I finished GREENSLADE, that was the end of the contract with Warner Brothers, because I didn’t have a record deal for a solo album. The managing director of Warners in London at that time was Derek Taylor, who used to be the press officer for THE BEATLES, so I went to see him, and we had a very good meeting. And at the end of it, he said, “Go make the album!” but the other thing was, I was going to call it “Thirty Three & 1/3” which I mentioned to Derek at the meeting, because I thought it was quite clever, and he didn’t say anything. But very soon after that meeting, George Harrison brought out an album of the same name. Derek was great friends with George, they worked very closely together, so he just passed on a good piece of information to George.
– So it wasn’t a coincidence? They stole your title?
Yeah, but it doesn’t matter, you know, it’s a music business. So George got there first, and I had to desperately think of another name, which I did.
– I’d say “Cactus Choir” with its alliteration is no less memorable.
Good! I think most people have said this. I have no idea where that title came from, except my head, but it worked anyway.
– Was the material that ended up on “Cactus Choir” originally written for GREENSLADE?
I had some sketches from GREENSLADE which I was going to use, but I had to add a lot more once it was confirmed I was going to make a solo album.
– How was it working with Rupert Hine as a producer?
Quite honestly, he didn’t do a lot of producing. See, in those days, record companies always liked the artist to have a producer. It was a kind of unwritten thing, because I think they didn’t trust the artist. But Rupert, bless him, didn’t really produce the album; I produced it.
– Who found all these stellar players: Simon Phillips, Mick Grabham and others?
I did. I can’t remember how I got Mick, but Simon was the son of a very famous jazz band player called Sid Phillips, and he lived very close to where I was, in Bushey, in Hertfordshire. And Simon was a prodigy – he was about seventeen and he was the most fantastic drummer. I’d never heard anyone, certainly of that age, playing drums like he did. He went on to make a very big successful career, doing sessions and all sorts of things, but he was a wonderful drummer at seventeen. His father, Sid, had taught him to read music when he was very, very young, so he could read all the drum parts for sessions and so on, which a lot of drummers in those days couldn’t do. He had a fantastic feel, and I loved playing with him. It was great. That’s the only time I did, but thank goodness I did: I made a whole album with Simon Phillips! I think I heard him on another recording. I can’t remember which one, and someone else told me about him as well, so I investigated and just asked him to do it. And he said, “Yeah!” He was hungry, he was a young kid and just wanted to get in there. Quite right, too.
– You mentioned reading music. Can you do that, given you had your piano lessons?
No, no, not very well. Put it this way: I could not make a living reading music. I can read music, but not up at the speed that you need to be a session musician. You’ve got to be really on the ball for that. But I’ve got a technique, and we used a kind of jazz shorthand, like chord charts, and various little notes and stuff. That’s what I use quite successfully.
– That’s why you had Martyn Ford on your album?
Yes. He had an orchestra, and he arranged it, because I couldn’t do that. But Martyn was doing sessions all the time, whereas I at least had a continuity in a band or a setup for a long time.
– And it was in the spirit of continuity that you invited Chris Farlowe to sing the theme song for the “Gangsters” series that you wrote music for around that time?
I only asked Chris to sing “Gangsters” for the second series. The first series used my theme tune that didn’t have lyrics – there was no song – but when we got to the second one, David Rose, the [BBC’s] head producer in Birmingham, asked me to write some words. I immediately thought of Chris, who had just been working with me. We had just done a thing together for BBC television called “Curriculee Curricula”: it was a 50-minute musical that David asked me to create all the music for. I’d never done that before, a musical, and now I kind of was the musical director, would you believe, and wrote all the songs. It was great fun but it only went out on BBC2 in 1978. Sonja Cristina from CURVED AIR was the lead female singer in it, and I got Chris Farlowe in to be the lead male singer.
– How easy it is to rework a complete piece of music that you wrote originally as an instrumental into a song, to lift a melody and transform it into a top line for vocal?
I found it quite natural, but I was up against a deadline – I had a month or something to do this, so I would just sit down and do it. And it all worked.
– Since you don’t write sheet music, how do you submit what you wrote for television?
They gave me the technology which had come in then, so that I could play lots of keyboards and record on multitrack. This was quite a new thing for television, and that’s the way I did it. I composed it all and I wrote all the chord charts out and everything, so I had a whole plan, a map in front of me, if you like, and played it like that and recorded it to picture. They would give me the final pictures, and I would record to the pictures so that it was exactly in time and the feeling and everything was correct. I love doing that, and I did it for twenty years.
– You worked like that on a lot TV programs. Does it mean that you have about twenty unreleased albums in your archive? You should have all this music, right?
This is true. The BBC got the copyright, but I get the royalties from all that music. Some of it I recorded at the BBC, so they would have it on their machines, and some of it is on my multitrack, but I’m not going to go down that road, because time is too short and I need time for other things.
– Back in 1977, you had a new band with Mick Rogers, Dave Markee and Simon Phillips. Was it another line-up of GREENSLADE?
It wasn’t called GREENSLADE, but I needed a new band to be able to play and possibly to promote the “Cactus Choir” music. It didn’t become a permanent thing for very long. We didn’t plan to do huge tours or anything.
– Was Mick going to be a singer with that band?
Mick is a very fine player, and he was great to play with, but I don’t think we got that far. We did a few gigs, and then it all went away into the atmosphere.
– Is it true that eventually Tony and Jon stepped into that band?
No, but they sometimes played on the television things with me.
– So you started writing music for television and you became a sonic illustrator for two projects. One was with “The Pentateuch Of The Cosmogony” by Patrick Woodroffe in 1979 and the other “From The Discworld” for Terry Pratchett in 1985. But that’s one thing to compose to moving pictures and it’s something completely different when deal with text.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Patrick was a very intense guy and very talented, and I respected and appreciated what he did as an artist [on the cover of “Time And Tide”], but his writing was good as well – good story, quite deep. However, when he asked me to illustrate it with music, it was a new thing for me – as you said, there were no moving pictures on a page, only ideas – so I just applied myself to that and got inside the project as far as I could. Also, we got a deal, which was the most important thing, because it was going to be a very expensive project to create: a double album with this whole book of beautiful paintings and so on. It required a special contract, and we had that with EMI, bless them, who gave us the money to be able to record it properly. It was marvelous.
– There were two other musicians involved with “The Pentateuch”: Phil Collins and John Lingwood. How did you get them to play on the album?
I’ve been very fortunate in my whole life to meet some great drummers – fantastic drummers! – and those two were part of that. I knew John Lingwood because he lived very close to me when I was young, so we were friends for a long way back, and he was playing with MANFRED MANN‘S EARTH BAND at the time, and Phil Collins was asked to come and play by “The Pentateuch” producer Robin Lumley, so he came in the studio and played on a few tracks. A stunning player, very dynamic! I feel very honored and humbled that guys like these said “Yes” and they would like to come and play with me over the years.
– Would it be right to call “The Pentateuch” new age music?
No, I wouldn’t call it any age; it was all ages, wasn’t it? It’s all-age music. And fantastic in the real sense of the word. It was a fantastic concept. And it’s doing well: it’s still out, it’s still available. It was a style created for those pictures and for the story and nothing else. I didn’t go at it and say, I’m going to do it like new age or progressive rock, or this, or that. Yes, it’s very important to have a label on it for people to understand what it is before they listen to it, but I never, ever consciously wrote with any particular label in mind; I just wrote what I felt was right for the project, whatever the project was.
– What about the “Going South” album? It chimed with this new age idea of nature, didn’t it?
“Going South” was something completely different. As I said in the album’s notes, I used to see these birds in migratory times, flying south for the winter, and it used to give me a particular thrill – still does! That’s what really sparked it. And I thought that “Going South” was a good title too. I like that album.
– After “The Pentateuch” was out, you spent most of the Eighties writing for television. Was it enough to make a living?
I could make more money making music for television than I could going to play rock ‘n’ roll! The secret was, I composed it all, and the composer would attract royalties every time a program was shown on the screen. Most of my stuff was BBC, sometimes ITV, so I would get paid for writing it as a composer, a fee, plus royalties, and I would also get paid as a musical director to record it all. I got paid twice! Don’t tell the taxman. (Laughs.) Nah, the taxman knows already, so it’s fine. So yes, it was a very lucrative way, a solid way to make money and still make music, to still enjoy myself making music, because I enjoyed making that music. It was a whole new world, being in television, and there was a whole new way of working: the television people have their own schedules and so on, and you have to go by their rules, not rock ‘n’ roll rules.
– And you were not even once tempted to record a solo album if you didn’t want to join or form a band?
I tell you what: once I’d been asked to do it, I kept being asked to do it and I never had time to do anything else. I really didn’t. In twenty years, I did more than twenty series of television. New directors, new producers, new ideas coming from their pictures – I enjoyed it.
– But you still found time for the Terry Pratchett album.
Well, yes. But that was quite late. The television had slowed down in the Nineties, and I was glad when Terry asked me to do this album. I knew him for years before that; he lived in a part of the West Country near Bristol, where a dear friend of mine lived who introduced him to me. I met him at a party at night, at two o’clock in the morning, and we had a long, long talk about “The Pentateuch”: he had “The Pentateuch” on a cassette, and he phoned me one day to say he’d worn it out and ask if I could send him another copy. We got on very well, and then he wanted me to do music for “Discworld”!
– Were you familiar with the series?
I wasn’t, so I had to quickly read all the books because Terry wanted me to. Again, we had a deal with Virgin Records, so we did it properly, and I think it’s still selling, I think it’s still doing okay.
– How did you imagine all those characters? For instance, you used a Spanish melody for Death.
They have a dance of death, which is very Spanish, in Mexico, with a trumpet.
– You based it on Cinco de Mayo?
Yes, I wanted to write a song for Death with that. Why not? And I imagined him tap dancing in the wings, the side of the stage. Terry’s characters were so alive that it was easy. It was almost like I was meeting the characters that were already there. Like The Luggage, this fantastic but dangerous piece of kit: if you got anywhere near it, it would have your fingers off. It was fabulous! (Laughs.) All of that came out of Terry’s wonderful mind, and I picked up on it and managed to hopefully do a good job on it. I’m sure Terry is looking down, smiling.
– You released that album around the same time that COLOSSEUM came back.
– Exactly. After all of what we’ve just been speaking about, television and so on, I became fifty years old, Now, for rock and roll, that is old, man! So my wife, who was in the music business as well, got together all these guys for my birthday. Jon Hiseman, Tony Reeves, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Clem Clempson, Chris Farlowe – everybody came to this very surprise party in Hertfordshire. It was a mixture of COLOSSEUM, GREENSLADE and all sorts of people, and by the end of the evening, it had been decided we were going to reform the band. There was a piano in the corner, and at one point Chris came over and we played “Stormy Monday” – just Chris and myself. And Clem went up to Jon and said, “Listen to that. We’ve got to do this again!” That’s how that happened. It was another natural thing to do. It was just absolutely natural. Nothing forced about any of it, which I found all the way along, all the way through everything. It just seems to naturally flow from one thing to another. I’ve been very lucky in that regard.
It took a year, but we got together, so Jon said to the agent who worked with [his wife, Barbara Thompson’s band] PARAPHERNALIA, to go out there and see what the reaction would be if we were to form the band again, and this guy came back in about five days and said, “How many gigs do you want to do?” We could do as many as we wanted. And we did. We started off in June 1994, playing festival in Freiburg, Germany, which went down a storm, absolute storm! The next gig was October in “E-Werk” in Cologne: we played there, and that was packed, absolutely packed. Everybody wanted COLOSSEUM, there was so much demand for us to play all over Europe, and the band sounded better the second time around than it did the first time, so there was no problems with the music: we were just flying, as I suppose we’d all grown up a bit and all learned a bit more about stuff.
– So you had no trouble inhabiting the band’s sonic identity anew?
No, absolutely not. In fact, when we started the first rehearsals, Jon counted in “Those About To Die” and we just played it right through, without any problems at all. We all looked at each other, and it felt like we hadn’t been apart for twenty-three years.
– Was the comeback of GREENSLADE inspired by the success of COLOSSEUM’s reunion?
Well, no, it was just another idea. And why not? We investigated everything in those days, and there was demand for GREENSLADE, too. Do you realize that GREENSLADE was more popular in Japan than COLOSSEUM? I went there in 2007, and they wanted me to bring GREENSLADE over to Japan. But I never did that either – you can’t do everything.
– Did you go to Japan to perform? Did you ever play a completely solo gig in your life?
I went there with COLOSSEUM and played two concerts, but completely solo? No, I don’t think so. When we were children, I was with Jon and Tony, and then the family expanded as we went along and became various bands, so no.
– When you decided to try GREENSLADE again, did you try to get in touch with Dave Lawson?
Yes, we’re still in touch, but Dave got to a point where he couldn’t tour. Physically, he’s not well. He couldn’t do this, so I had no choice. But I found the wonderful John Young: he has a great voice, he’s a great keyboard player, and he’s a great guy as well, great fun to be with.
– How different the new GREENSLADE were compared to the old one?
We had new instruments. (Laughs.) But music was still the same, and people enjoyed it.
– The new line-up released only one studio album, "Large Afternoon" in 2000 – with “Hallelujah Anyway” that Patrick Woodroffe wrote the lyrics for.
He did, indeed. There was going to be a project called “Hallelujah Anyway” – a whole album, like “The Pentateuch” – but we never made it, did we?
– Was it going to be a GREENSLADE album or a Greenslade-Woodroffe album?
A Greenslade-Woodroffe album. But we never got around to that, and then poor Patrick died.
– And then, there are last three albums by classic COLOSSEUM, with a few collaborations that I don’t think you had engaged in before. There’s a piece on “Bread & Circuses” titled “The One That Got Away”: the first and only track you co-wrote with Mark Clarke.
What happened was, he didn’t write a lot for the band, but he wrote that eight-bar section and came to me and said, “Dave, can you do something with this, please?” So I did, and I acknowledged Mark as the originator of the piece of music, so he got his royalties.
– Another new collaboration was on “Time On Our Side”: you co-wrote “Anno Domini” and “Dick’s Licks” with Pete Brown.
Pete Brown used to write for COLOSSEUM, so I always appreciated his lyrics. I loved his lyrics, and I got on with him very well as a guy too, so it was another natural thing to do.
– How did the band change without Dick and with Barbara in his place?
Oh, I loved both of them, and I loved playing with both of them, but they were totally different players. Totally different!
– Yes, Barbara had a softer sound, and Dick had this fierceness.
Yeah, “fierceness” is a good word. And it was quite “raw” – that’s another good word. And quite “unpredictable” is another word – especially unpredictable in his solos. We would look at Dick and think, “Where’s he going? Where’s he going?” But wherever he went, it would always be very interesting. He was a great player, and we wrote together a lot. But poor Dick had been very ill, and when Barbara came into the band, it was at very short notice – and though she was always there because she was in the family, she had never really been a big fan of COLOSSEUM. Still, when she had to step up to the plate, as it were, she was magnificent. We had very, very little time for rehearsals, so Jon had a brilliant idea again as a leader: he decided the best way for Barbara to learn the material was to employ a music writer, a copyist.
We employed this guy and paid him to write out all the saxophone parts, which was a lot of work. He sat up all night, and it cost a lot of money to do, but it was the quickest and easiest way for Barbara to learn, as she could read everything. So we went in the next day to rehearse, and the book was there; we started off, and she just read the parts. And then, of course, she became more creative because she had to play solos and integrate with the band in all sorts of ways – and she was absolutely brilliant! There was a section in one of the pieces where it was just piano and saxophone, and I started to tell her the sequence I was using, because it wasn’t written down but I’d been using it for months, with Dick, and she said, “There’s no need to tell me. Just play it, and I’ll learn it!” And she learned it straight away – as soon as I started playing it, she was there. She had a marvelous musical head! Incredible! And great fun to be with.
– You mentioned piano, and you rarely used the acoustic instrument with COLOSSEUM – except for “Arena In The Sun” on “Tomorrow’s Blues” that has a very prominent piano part – why?
On stage, it was quite physically difficult. I had a Hammond organ in front of me and a synthesizer on top to play strings and electric piano stuff, so there wasn’t much more room for a real piano. It was a practical way of playing, because I could get real piano sounds on my synthesizers.
– So you always wrote music with a prospect of performing it live?
I had to. If we were going to write stuff for an album, which was then going to be played on stage. I had to think about all those things: about how we’d be recording and how we’d perform it on stage. We all had to think about that all the time. It’s a very different thing to play on stage as opposed to in a studio where you can stop and start again; therefore, you have to arrange the instrumentation that it’s possible to do. And there’s only so many hands I’ve got, and so many keyboards I could play at one time.
– You lost interest in the band after Jon passed away?
I thought that was the end of COLOSSEUM when he went. I know it isn’t, and I know that COLOSSEUM is still going, and I’m very pleased for the guys that are left to go and continue our music. But I just felt that COLOSSEUM had died with Jon and Barbara.
– Did you hear the new COLOSSEUM?
I haven’t been to see them, no, but I believe they’re doing well, and I wish them all the best. I speak with Clem quite often, and it’s great that he’s carrying it on.
– Would it be strange for you to listen to COLOSSEUM without you?
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I’ve heard their album [2022’s “Restoration”], and it’s good. And it’s different, because there’s no Jon, there’s no Barbara, and there’s no me.
– What do you think of Nick Steed who replaced you?
I haven’t listened to the album very much, but he does the job really well. It’s a great band to be in, and I’m sure he’ll have some great fun.
– So you retired, but even before that, before COLOSSEUM stopped, you had to look back at your career and come up with the “Routes-Roots” album. Were you taking stock of what you’ve done?
In a very lighthearted way, yeah. It was a small solo project. I liked the idea of the title [as rendered on the disc cover], though: “Routes” across and “Roots” down.
– And then you issued "Time To Make Hay": a collection of archival bits and pieces.
“Time To Make Hay” was a title that Patrick Woodroffe had thought of as one of the songs for that “Hallelujah” project that we never did, so I used it when I wanted to put another album out, full of my demos. They were all demos that I’d made on a sixteen-track machine in my little studio at home, but I thought they were good enough and I wanted them to come out. And of course, it was time to make hay, because things were changing and moving on.
– But you came out of your retirement to make “G & T”?
Many years ago, when I was still touring with COLOSSEUM, I went to our local theatre in Bungay in Suffolk where I live, and there was a band playing, and someone had said, “You must go and hear this guy, Dave Thomas!” So I did, and I thought, “It’s great! One day I’m going to play with that guy!” We became friends, but we were both very, very busy – I was busy up until 2015 with COLOSSEUM – but we decided we were going to make an album together. And eventually we did. That’s “G & T”: it’s a lovely album, and it’s very different from COLOSSEUM and GREENSLADE.
– Looks like you have this strange proclivity for making albums with guys called Dave.
This is true. This is a good point. (Laughs.) I hadn’t thought of that. But it was meant to be. “G & T” has been received very well, so Dave and I are working on a second album – we’re halfway through the material.
– How do you approach writing with him?
It’s a different kettle of fish, as they say. He’s a very bluesy guy, which I love, he’s got a beautiful voice and he plays fine guitar. And we have a lot of fun together.
– What I didn’t expect from either of you was tango: there’s a track called “Last Tango” on this album, and “Free Fall” is tango as well. Did you want to come across as old-timey?
Well, no, not really. It was a bit like playing Spanish tunes for Death. With music, you can move sideways, upwards, downwards, any way you like. You can do whatever comes into your head: if it’s worthy to be there, then you use it.
– And now let me list some titles you were involved in: “Valentyne Suite” and “Daughter Of Time,” “Tomorrow’s Blues” and “Upon Tomorrow,” “Take The Dark Times With The Sun” and “Time On Our Side”… Are you obsessed with the concept of time?
Obviously! I live within the concept of time. We all live within it, within its restrictions. It’s an important thing: it’s the only thing we’ve all got while we’re still alive. So we have to make the most of it. We should make the most of it.