Interview with NICK MAGNUS

October 2024

Why does progressive rock have to be contrived? Here’s the question which never seemed to prey on Nick Magnus’ mind. And though almost all of the British composer’s oeuvre belongs to this genre, its orchestral scope – sculpted completely on his keyboards – is so rich as to break down any stylistic barriers there are. However, Magnus could not care less about genres and styles, because for him only stories and melodies must serve as record-driven engines, and Nick’s albums excel in tuneful storytelling.

Of course, many a listener may maintain that the ivories master’s claim to fame would lie with his remarkable spell as Steve Hackett‘s right-hand man in the late ’70s and early ’80s, yet it’s Magnus’ solo career that should properly highlight his talents. And if Nick’s previous works felt quiet serious in terms of concept, the pieces of 2024’s "A Strange Inheritance" bring forth a different aspect of what the veteran does: his adventurousness. But how did such a journey was charted? Here’s the question which took us a few hours to find an answer to.

– You’re not a classically trained piano player, Nick, are you?

Not in the sense that most people would be. I did have piano lessons, but I only took them up until about fifteen, and then I switched to cathedral organ for a couple of years, and that was the end of my formal training. After that, I basically taught myself whatever it was I needed to know.

– But if you didn’t have this training, where did all this orchestral scope of your works come from? I think it would require a deeper dive into classical, symphonic music.

Well, it’s difficult to say, really. I grew up very much with classical music because my mother had a big [record] collection and she was always playing it, so I was exposed to it a lot then. But I think my biggest influence in modern times is film music, because a lot of it is very classical: John Williams’ scores are the best example, but there are loads of other film composers as well. I listened to John Barry, James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, all of those people, and that’s what inspired this classical approach.

– It’s not only the composer’s approach, though. Most of your records sound very orchestral, and that requires knowledge of arrangement and instrumentation, writing each part separately.

I’ve sort of taught myself whatever it was I needed to know as I went along. With the orchestral instruments, for example, you need to know what their ranges are, so I did a lot of research into that to find out the notes that instruments can’t play and the notes that they can play but players find difficult to play. You assemble all of that knowledge over a long period of time and try not to make silly mistakes. When I’m listening to music, I do, as well as enjoying it, tend to analyze it. The analytical part of my brain kicks in and I’m listening to what those instruments are doing, and it’s not so much the parts they’re playing, but how they’re playing it, because phrasing and dynamics are a really essential part. I mean, getting the notes right is one thing, but if that’s all you did, it wouldn’t sound any good. You have to think carefully about – for instance, with woodwind instruments: how long can the musicians play before they have to breathe? You hear a lot of virtual instruments in classical renditions, where you get a wind instrument which is playing this ridiculously long line without taking a breath, and you just think: no, that’s not possible. You have to phrase things properly. So it’s acquiring all of that knowledge over a period of time by just listening, doing research and trying to put it into practice. Yeah, it’s been a long process, but you get better as you go along.

– Analytical mind and creativity don’t often go hand in hand with each other, especially when emotionality is factored in. How do you balance that?

Oh, that’s a really difficult question to answer. The emotional content of a piece is very important, and again, that comes down to dynamics, to getting the instruments to express themselves as much as possible. Yes, it can be difficult the analytical and the emotional sides to coexist, but you can do it, you can, you can do it. It’s a question of thinking – What emotion do I want to put across here? How do I do that? What would a real orchestra do? What would a real member of an orchestra do to do that? – and then basically bully the instruments into doing it. Some instruments are better than others for putting that across, and it can be quite a disadvantage with some instruments if they don’t have sufficient dynamic range to them, so you have to pick and choose, and I’ve got a huge arsenal of instruments to pick from. So if I’m picking out, say, a flute part, I’ve got a number of different instruments that will do that. It’s picking the one that has the right tone, the right vibrato, the right dynamic range, and then sitting that in the piece, and sometimes you know that you can go through a long process of choosing one and putting it in and going, “No, that’s not doing it. That’s not getting the idea across!” Eventually you find one and it works, but it’s a trial-and-error process. It’s intuition, really, it’s an intuitive approach.

– But you still use real musicians – for instance, John Hackett who plays flute – although most of what we hear on your records is played by yourself. According to Chas Cronk, you were ahead of the game with sequencers, but when I listen to you play, it sounds very natural. How do you achieve that?

It’s putting yourself in the mindset of the player that you’re impersonating. For me, of the great pleasures and challenges of doing this is trying to make it not sound like me, like the same person playing the instrument. I don’t know if this will mean anything to you or any of my listeners, but back in the Sixties, there was a program called “Joe 90” – made by Gerry Anderson who did “Thunderbirds” and “Stingray”: all those science fiction puppet programs. Joe 90 was a character, a little boy whose father had invented a machine where he could imprint the brain patterns of anybody, and he put it in a pair of spectacles, so when Joe 90 had to go on a mission, the spectacles were loaded up with the brain pattern of the person he was supposed to be – a spy, for example – and he would put the glasses on and immediately have these abilities. So I call it “a Joe 90 approach”! And quite often – certainly with non-orchestral instruments like like guitars, basses, pianos, organs, Mellotrons, whatever it is – I’m influenced by existing players. I think, how would this particular bassist play this part – How would, I’m just pulling a name out of the hat, Chris Squire play this? How would John Giblin play this? – and then try and be that person. But at the same time, it’s still me doing it, and I’m still putting my own approach to it, and with any luck, it sounds like a group of different people playing.

– You’re describing, to simplify it, melodic parts, but what about the actual texture of sound?

It depends on the instrument that I’ve got and its capabilities. Whenever I acquire a new instrument, I’ll spend a lot of time learning it, learning what it can do and what it can’t do, and then pushing it to its limits. For example, if I’m doing a guitar part and I want to do feedback on a particular note, I pick an instrument that can do that, think about what points in the note would a guitarist introduce that feedback at, and then make it do it at that point.

– And you use samplers?

Yes. Lots.

– Since we’re talking about various instruments, what do you find more emotionally expressive, or maybe challenging, to be playing: a pure piano or a synthesizer?

I think the synthesizers are wonderful, and I grew up with synthesizers, but as I’ve gone further, I found it more rewarding and more challenging to recreate real-world instruments, because it’s quite difficult to make artificial recreations of real instruments sound real. But that’s part of the joy, rising to the challenge of making it happen. So I find that, when I’m using synthesizers, they play more of a supporting role, they’re not so much featured. Yes, you do get the occasional synthesizer solo or something like that, but usually I use them texturally, and as the albums have progressed, I find myself more and more and more recreating acoustic instruments: that gives me more pleasure for some reason – I find that every bit as rewarding as playing the real thing. I have a particularly good piano, which I always tend to have as my first-choice instrument.

Over the years, I’ve collected lots of different sample pianos, and they’ve done their job, and they’ve been as good as they could get for the time, but the one I use now, a thing called Pianoteq, isn’t even sampled, it’s physically modelled, and I find that every bit as expressive. I don’t find myself lacking a real piano at all when I play it, because it has a completely continuous dynamic range to it. On a lot of sample pianos, the dynamics appear in steps, so it can be very awkward when you’re playing a part which has some subtlety to it: you do a little phrase, which you just want to be at a certain volume, and you’re listening back and you go, “No, that needs to be a little bit louder!” and then you push the notes up in volume, and suddenly they’re too loud, and you can’t get in between – it’s either too quiet or too loud, because it jumped to the next dynamic level. But with Pianoteq, it’s a continuous variation of dynamics, so you can exactly tailor how the thing responds to the way you’re playing.

– And when did it all start for you? How did you begin to move into the field of rock ”n’ roll?

With my first school band when I was, seventeen. Up until that point, I hadn’t listened to very much rock music; what I listened to most of all was music from the TV. I amassed a huge collection on cassettes of TV theme tunes – I’d record them, and it was a very dangerous process, actually, recording them, because I would connect up some wires to the speaker inside the back of the TV. We had these incredibly high voltages running around in our old cathode ray-tube televisions, but I didn’t care – I just wired some cables to the speaker, stuck a resistor across them to chop the signal down, and put that into a cassette recorder. And I’d sit there in front of the TV all evening, so every time a theme tune would come up, I’d record it. That was my listening pleasure – I would just sit and listen to hours and hours worth of TV music – and it was very educational too, because on the television, certainly in the Sixties and Seventies, there was a huge variety of styles and genres of music, everything from orchestral to pop, to rock, to reggae, to everything, so I was exposed to all of this stuff, and it was filtering in into the brain and getting locked in.

Still, my first rock ‘n’ roll experiences didn’t come until quite late. The first proper rock album I ever bought was “The Man Who Sold The World” by David Bowie, and it grew from there. At that point, as I had some instruments at home, including a portable organ, I figured, “Let’s make a band!” So me and three or four friends got together and formed our first band. And we were terrible! (Laughs.) I still have some old cassettes of our Saturday afternoons rehearsals. God, they’re chaotic! What a terrible noise! One of these days, I must copy these cassettes off onto the computer and clean them up to make them a bit more listenable, but just for our guys – I’d never release them to anybody. Yeah, everything starts from small beginnings. Still, once I had a taste of it, I wanted more, so the bands progressed from there.

– The first professional band you were in were THE ENID, correct?

Well, just prior to THE ENID I was in a little three-piece band that was playing… let’s call it progressive rock. It was all own compositions, instrumental things, but we didn’t do very many gigs, and when we did, our audiences were generally very confused. (Laughs.) They thought they were coming along to hear rock classics, and what they got was a load of self-indulgent pieces.

– Three-piece means there were bass, drums and yourself, the main soloist?

Yes. And I only had an electric piano, so it was quite minimal, but we tried to make the music as complex as possible, which didn’t go down terribly well with the audiences. As I said, they were expecting something they could dance to, and they couldn’t do it in 11/8 or 7/4. So when I joined THE ENID, it was a quantum leap. It was huge! Suddenly, I was playing these incredibly involved and difficult arrangements, which were quite hard to learn, and some parts were really hard to play. That was baptism by fire.

– But you didn’t stay long.

I didn’t stay long, no, and that’s a whole other story, which I probably shouldn’t go into.

– So you left and formed AUTUMN. I didn’t know that the band’s album was recorded back in the day, I would say it’s a recent one, as it sounds very modern. When you released it many years later, was it the original recording or you enhanced it in some way and added something to it?

No, it was more or less an original recording that was done in 1977. There was a local music shop to us where our guitarist worked, and they had just opened an eight-track demo studio upstairs, so they wanted a band to test it. Of course, we eagerly put our hands up and said, “Yeah, we’ll do it! We’ll test it!” And that’s what we recorded. Apart from one or two keyboard overdubs, it’s played entirely live, because we were quite well-rehearsed. We spent pretty much all our time rehearsing. So we were so we were quite able to put all that stuff down live. As for the overdubs, they were done back in the day, at the time we recorded it. For example, there’s a part in “Oceanworld” where I had the string machine playing some chords, but there’s also what sounds like a French horn playing a line on top: that also came from the string machine, but it couldn’t do both at once, so I overdubbed that afterwards. We never intended to release these recordings, and we lost the original master tapes for quite some time. And then our guitarist, Mark [Easton], found them in a black bin liner under the stairs one day and gave them to me. I put them on the Revox recorder, and there it was. I just copied the tapes onto digital and we put it out on CD in 1999.

– You said you recorded the album live and that you rehearsed. But did AUTUMN actually play on stage?

Yes, we did. And we even had fans, we actually had appreciative audiences. I think we did one or two concerts in the London area, but we pretty much played locally, in the South Coast, down in Portsmouth.

– And after that, you got a call from Steve Hackett who has a very specific sound, both in terms of harmony parts and tone that take all the dynamic range. Did you find it difficult to fit your keyboards into that sonic spectrum?

No, not at all. It was very easy. Steve is one of the easiest, if not the easiest, musicians I’ve ever worked with. When I first joined him, there obviously were two albums out, "Voyage Of The Acolyte" and "Please Don't Touch"; in learning the pieces of those albums, I either learned the existing parts, or some of the existing parts that were there, or develop my own parts. But I had a particular sound palette of my own – at the time I had at my disposal a Fender Rhodes piano, an RMI electric piano, a miniKorg synthesizer, the clavinet and The Vox string thing, and to we added to that the Mellotron and a Roland SH-2000, like a little preset synthesizer – that was limited, but very specific, so we had to make that work, and by and large, Steve left me to my own devices to figure out parts on my own, and I found it very easy to fit in with what he was playing.

Of course, on the later albums, "Spectral Mornings" and beyond, I was completely free to come up with whatever keyboard parts and sounds I wanted to, which was great because it was it demonstrated Steve’s trust in me. And also, one of the things we liked doing was having an ambiguity of sound: sometimes it could be hard to tell whether it was guitar or synthesizer or other keyboard playing. We liked to mix, for example, twelve-string guitar and clavinet together, playing complementary harmony parts, and that combination worked really well. When we were doing synthesizer things, a good example is “Slogans”: there’s that very fast pattern that goes (sings), “dun-dun-dun-dun-dun dun-dun-dun-dun-dun” – we’re playing that together in unison, and it’s the kind of a layered sound, so it’s hard to separate the guitar and the Minimoog. We had a, I hesitate to say a telepathic, wordless communication, but it felt like that at times, so it was an ideal working partnership.

– You stayed with Steve for years. What does it say about your personality?

I don’t know. It probably means that he liked me and what I was doing. And when you have that kind of working relationship with somebody, there’s a loyalty, a two-way loyalty: you just want to work with each other.

– And you continue working not only with him, but with his family because there’s John and there’s Amanda Lehmann who’s his sister-in-law on your albums and you on their? Do you feel like a part of the Hackett family now?

Oh, yes, we’re a family, no doubt about it, and I work with Pete Hicks as well. I think you’ll find that, in prog rock circles generally, people do congregate into families of musicians, and certain musicians always pick certain other ones to work with, and ours is no different. It’s a family – not just musically, but socially as well.

– How essential was it for you, when you first joined Hackett’s band, to be playing live with him before going into the studio and working on new material?

When you have the live experience first, it makes the recording process probably quicker because you’re not spending time in the studio, routining stuff, writing stuff. We certainly did that with “Spectral Mornings” as we toured with most of it quite a bit at the end of 1978 before recording the album at the beginning of 1979, so that was pretty well rehearsed.

– Since we started talking about particular songs and albums… "Cured" is a very special record: Steve and you made it as a duo. Was it interesting? Was it challenging? Or was it just a matter of circumstance?

Circumstances did come into it. We were in between the band line-ups, and because we obviously wanted to make an album, we started recording and discovered that we were able to do pretty much everything as a duo. It became a challenge in a way – even the use of the LinnDrum, which I know is controversial, even to this day. But at the time it seemed to be a logical thing to do, as it had just come out, and we saw it as cutting edge, because we were not aware of anybody else having done an entire album with the LinnDrum. And it’s also one’s perception of what something sounds like, so when I first heard it, I was bowled over. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, “My goodness, this sounds like real drums! This is incredible!” And of course, now it doesn’t. Also, I’m a bit of a frustrated drummer, and the LinnDrum allowed me to do things that I could never have done on a real drum kit. So the more we went down that road, the more inevitable it seemed to keep doing it, and we stuck with the two-person format. John did join in – he played flute on a couple of tracks – but by and large, it was just the two of us, with Steve playing bass guitar, and we really enjoyed the process.

– So you didn’t look at it as a set of demos for a band?

No, no.

– How did you approach the soundscape for “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” and the folk motifs of “Overnight Sleeper” – the motifs you also used on your solo albums?

“The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” is obviously very much centered on the guitar, it’s largely Steve’s guitar and my Prophet [analog synthesizer] – all the big synth brass sounds came from the Prophet-5. With that one, we developed a technique – which, again, we believe we were first to do – with the LinnDrum: we took the snare sound from the Linn – some of the other instruments as well, but primarily the snare – and fed it out to a speaker, which was put at the bottom of the lift shaft with a microphone at the top of it, capturing the ambience. And so the huge snare drum sound comes from that lift shaft. Of course, we discovered much later that we weren’t the first to do it, that Simon and Garfunkel did it on “The Boxer”: (sings) “na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na-na-na” – that was recorded in the lift shaft of the Chrysler building many years before, but we didn’t know that or, if we did know it, we’d forgotten. And then, when that reverb from the lift shaft was fed into an AMS reverb with a gate on it and we got this kind of sound where the reverb gets chopped off, we again thought that this was our own invention – and it was. Phil Collins did it much later.

– On “In The Air Tonight”?

Yeah, but we got there first. And “Overnight Sleeper”? We probably wouldn’t have thought of it at the time as being folk. Folk is not something I generally listen to, so that would have come from Steve. I think of it as being quite baroque in its own way, and I always think of “Overnight Sleeper” as a sister track to “Jacuzzi” on "Defector" – it fell in the same the same kind of filing cabinet, so I approached it from that point of view, and that’s where it went. And I don’t think of my solo pieces as of folk; they’re just a bit more delicate than the louder bits, a bit more detailed, a bit more nuanced. Featuring lots of acoustic sounds or acoustic types of sound as opposed to the more electric synthesizers, Hammond and all that kind of stuff, it’s a more delicate approach which, again, comes down to dynamics, to having a contrast, because, for me, music without contrast is tiresome to listen to. So for me, it’s not really folk. It’s just the other end of the dynamic spectrum. When I think of folk music, I always think of people strumming acoustic guitars and singing with their finger in their ear. (Laughs.) I think probably one thing you could actually say has a folk reference of a sort, is on “A Strange Inheritance” that references sea shanties, but it’s not actual sea shanties – it’s my own concoction of a sea shanty.

– So would you describe “Funny Feeling” from “Cured” as your attempt to play pop music?

Yes, that’s what it was. We did it when progressive rock was being lambasted for being a dinosaur and record companies were wanting more approachable and marketable music to a greater range of people, so there were pressure put on to do something that could be released as a single. I believe “Funny Feeling” was put out as a single, but I might be wrong there. It was either that or “Picture Postcard” [the latter. – DME], or maybe both. So yes, with those, there was a conscious effort to make them sound more poppy, if you like, more accessible.

– Was Steve receptive to having your solo pieces on his albums?

Yes, absolutely. When I was on my own at home, in between tours and recordings, I’d be coming up with ideas, and whenever I had an idea that I thought would actually fit an album or something that I thought Steve could relate to, I’d play it to him. And more often than not, it would get incorporated into an album, a classic example being “Camino Royale” – the whole opening section of it.

– I heard that you wrote a big chunk of “Hammer In The Sand” – but you’re not credited as a co-writer. Why?

It was an interesting birth for that piece. It originally started off as a song that Steve had written, a fairly jaunty melody in 6/8, and it was entirely different from what you hear now. We hadn’t actually started to record it – we had only been rehearsing, fiddling around with the ideas just to see whether it was worth working on – and in an idle moment, when everybody else was doing something else up in the studio, I went down into the live room, and there was a lovely Bösendorfer piano there. I generally don’t like sitting and playing if I think somebody’s listening, and I was pretty sure nobody was listening, so I started just doing this tune, but in 4/4, in that slow classical romantic style, and I probably changed the harmonies of it. As I was working this out, John Acock, who was our co-producer and engineer, was standing outside the room, around the corner, out of sight, listening, and after I’d been playing for a while, he came in and said, “Wow, you should play that to Steve!” I went, “Oh, my God, you’ve been listening, you’ve been listening!” (Laughs.) So he brought Steve down, and I played it to him, and he said, “I love it! Let’s do it like that!” That’s how it began.

– So it was only arrangement, not composition?

No, not the composition. It was the arrangement that was mine.

– Your last album with Steve was "Till We Have Faces" – recorded in very different circumstances. What do you remember about working in Brazil?

I was a complete change from working in the UK. The studio was lovely and very well equipped, but most of that equipment was not in the control room. They had a strange system where, if anything you needed, like a compressor or even an effect pedal, it was kept in another room at the top of the building and you had to hire it. So in the studio itself, you just had the absolute basics: the mixing desk, the amplifiers, the speakers, the microphones – and that was it. So we worked with the minimum of stuff and tried not to hire equipment, because it was pretty expensive to do. And it’s also at a time when musical instruments in Brazil were very expensive for people to buy. My go-to synthesizer then was a Roland Jupiter-8, but we didn’t want to ship it over to Brazil; fortunately, Steve had an English friend who lived in Brazil and who had a Jupiter-8, so he lent it to us for the duration, and pretty much all the keyboards on that album that we recorded, at least all the stuff we recorded in Brazil, was done on that. We also borrowed a Roland Juno-6 and a guitar synthesizer, GR-300, for Steve. Still, the whole experience was enhanced by the Brazilian musicians who came and joined in. Nobody wanted paying – they all insisted that they just wanted to do it for nothing. They were a terrific bunch of people, they just knew what was wanted. It was a very fun time, but it was strange, working at night because during the day you didn’t quite know what to do with yourself, whether to go to sleep or stay awake. Yeah, a really different experience.

– Did it expand your musical horizons, working with the Brazilians, with different rhythms and different instruments?

Yes, it did. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, as I’ve never worked with those that type of musicians before and I’d never played music with a Brazilian feel to it, so it was all very new to me. But of course, it was them that provided that aspect of it, not me. I just played on top of it, and when we got back to England, we added further overdubs and did further work on it.

– Why did you all have to go to Brazil in the first place? I don’t mean Steve who was married to a Brazilian artist, I mean the entire band.

It was just me and Steve, not the rest of the band at all. If anyone else joined in from the band, it was once we got back to England. We spent a week rehearsing in a house in the hills in Petropolis before we went into the studio, and pretty much wrote the album in that week. It was a very fast process – and quite interesting, sitting in a summer house and just playing.

– And then, when Steve went acoustic, you were basically cast aside, although you did play on "Bay Of Kings" to some extent. I know that you respected his decision, but how did you feel about being left off?

Steve’s entitled to do whatever he wants, and he’s a superb classical guitarist, so obviously, if he wants to make an album to showcase that, then that’s entirely up to him. And yes, I did a couple of spots on “Bay Of Kings” – that’s because those pieces needed a little extra keyboard to fill them up – but all the other acoustic albums were just the guitar, and there’s no reason at all why I would feel in any way left out.

– It took you about then years after that to begin a solo career and release “Straight On Till Morning” that, to me, sounds very different from everything you had done before that or did after that: it sounds very fusion-like to me. Did you try to expand into jazz rock?

Well, maybe a little bit. It’s my old influences popping out again. But that album was originally not going to be an actual release; it was originally written as library music, so the idea was to cover a variety of styles. But inevitably, it was a bit too idiosyncratic, so to this day, as far as I know, none of it was ever used for library music. (Laughs.) That’s why I decided to revisit it and re-record it all as a proper album. It was also at a period in my life when my chief ambition was to write music for television, which was why a lot of the pieces were designed to feel like TV theme tunes, and why they’re all quite short. At that time, I had a tendency to want to write pieces that develop and conclude in a fairly short space of time and are completely self-contained, but have no particular theme or concept to them and just nod towards a musical style. So in some ways, “Straight On Till Morning” is a bit of an oddity in that it’s not at all representative of what I do now, but it was my first album release, and I was anxious to get it out there. I wanted people to hear something like, “Hey, look, I can write music! Hey, listen to this!”

– So your first proper album would be “Inhaling Green”?

Yes, that’s when I concentrated. There’s still an element of the TV tune thing about it, but that album’s title track was the big turning point for me. I wrote that quite some time after I’d written all the rest of the album, and it was at that point that I met Dick Foster, who writes all the lyrics. “Inhaling Green” was just a short idea to begin with, but he asked me, “Why don’t you write longer pieces?” I said, “Oh, I don’t know. I find it rather difficult to write a long piece. People might get bored!” But he suggested that I should really expand on these things, and so, with this encouragement, I did, and of course, it turned into fifteen-sixteen minutes with three movements to it. Each time each of the movements would start life considerably shorter than it is now, and Dick would say, “No, expand it, extend it. This idea is too good!” And I just thought, “Okay, all right, I’ll do this!” And I suddenly found I really enjoyed extending pieces, so now I find it difficult to restrain myself. (Laughs.) And this is why the title track of “Inhaling Green” is completely different from the rest of the album and why it paves the way to what all the subsequent albums became. Without Dick’s input, I probably never would have done that.

– Who is this enigmatic Dick Foster who wrote lyrics for the rest of your albums, including the latest one? As a lyricist myself, I like his lyrics a lot – on both phonetic and semantic levels.

He’s my partner. And he would be delighted to hear you say that. He wouldn’t call himself a natural lyricist, but I think he is. His lyrics are almost poetic, and it may come as no surprise that one of his great heroes is Stephen Sondheim, who is the past master of phonetics and alliteration and all of that. Dick likes to work as many of those things into the lyrics as possible and also work in unusual words that you don’t normally find in lyrics. There’s one in “Babel Tower” on “Children Of Another God”: “vicarious”! Dick’s very well read, and he’s a historian – he’s retired from the BBC some years ago, and he writes some historical things and historical research now, which comes in quite useful when writing interesting lyrics.

A lot of married-couple creative teams sometimes don’t work so well – it can lead to unpleasant disagreements, but we don’t have those. We’re very much on the same wavelength, he likes the same music that I do, we like the same films, we like the same food – it all meshes together very nicely, so it’s easy to discuss. We spend a lot of time before writing anything, we spend a lot of time talking about the concept for something and quite often mapping it out on paper; we even have a storyboard, like a cartoon strip, if the album has a story, or points in text, and we work through it and chop, and change it. It even gets changed during the course of making the album – you suddenly decide that one part of the story is superfluous, that it’s not necessary anymore, or we need another bit to explain this. It’s forward-planning, so you know what it is you’re aiming for. And I find writing to a concept and writing to lyrics so much easier than the other way around.

– So we lyrics come first?

Yes, they do now. They do now. When we first started writing together, it was fifty-fifty – sometimes I’d write a bit of music and Dick would put some words to that, or he’d write some words and I put some music to that – but the more it went on, the more I discovered that there was a real value in having the words first.

– But the words drive the rhythm! Does it limit you in any way?

No, no, quite the opposite! You might think it would do, but you read through the lyrics and you have an initial impression straight away, either of the tonal palettes, the instrumentation, or the rhythm, and sometimes you’ll read a line, and a tune will instantly come into your head. What it means is that the music complements the lyric, and as the mood or the subject matter of the lyric changes, so does the music: when you get to a sad bit, the music is sad, and when you get to an angry bit, the music is angry. It’s symbiotic, and that is very important, because that’s what makes the narrative work.

– Going back to music and to “Inhaling Green”: there was one interesting guest, Geoff Whitehorn from PROCOL HARUM. How did you get to know him?

I knew Geoff because I’d worked with him before. After I’d worked with Steve, I started a music production company with a colleague of mine, Chris Cozens, and we had a project called PROJECT D. We released a series of what were loosely called synthesizer albums, where we did cover versions of famous tunes, and they could be either pop and rock songs or film themes, whatever, and we did a whole album called “Images” – yes, the titles that were chosen for these things were all a bit cheesy – where Geoff was the featured guitarist. Steve’s also on “Inhaling Green” – but I wanted a different approach, so I asked Geoff if he would join in, and he was only too happy to.

– You have “The Devil in the Deep Blue Sea” on “Inhaling Green” – a very relaxed piece that I dare compare to Richard Clayderman – and “Cantus” which is a rave, electronic dance. How do you approach this variety of styles within a single context?

I like variety, and it just comes down to that. In fact, “Cantus” that proved to be quite a popular piece with people was developed from a piece written with Duncan Browne which had originally been composed as part of the incidental music for a TV program. Duncan used to write a lot of music for television, and I worked on it with him, but it was only a short piece, and I decided it would be nice to stretch it out and develop it a bit, and I liked the vibe. And of course, at the time ENIGMA was popular, so it was very much a nod towards them.

– Your next record was “Hexameron” where you tried something that I don’t think you’d ever tried before. Was “Marduk” supposed to be a mini-opera? How did you get to the decision to use several voices within a single track?

It is a bit like a mini-opera, yes. The are different characters: Tony [Patterson] plays the part of Marduk, the thunder god, and Debi Doss plays the part of the dragon Tiamat, who represents Chaos. In their ensuing battle, Tiamat is cut in two, forming the heavens and the earth, and Chaos resolves into Reason. The concept of the album is basically describing different creation myths from various cultures, and the “Marduk” song comes from a Babylonian myth, and the illustration on the front cover shows Marduk too: it’s actually a tiny seal on a ring, that illustration, a tiny seal which we blew up. The album starts with “Singularity” – which is the Big Bang that may or may not have happened, who knows? – and ends with the end of the universe, where everything is, where chaos is resolved into reason.

– Whose conceptual ideas lie behind most of your albums, Dick’s or yours?

Dick is the one who mostly comes up with the concepts, although we do discuss what we can do. We discuss various ideas, and when we hit upon one that I think has got some legs in terms of writing music, we go with that. But the whole “Hexameron” album was an extension from the last track on “Inhaling Green” which goes through a timeline of creation, its last segment being “Weighing Of The Souls: it’s an interpretation of the final days where people’s souls are judged whether they go to the good place or the bad place.

– You’re talking about creation with, should I use this word, effusiveness that I just have to ask: do you ever stop being inspired by the very fact of being able to create?

It always amazes me that I can write anything at all! Sometimes you do go through long stretches where the muse doesn’t come, and you just don’t know where it comes from, because nobody can explain creativity. There’s no fixed formula to it at all, there’s no method – if there was and I knew what it was, I’d be writing all the time without stopping. (Laughs.) You just have to wait for it to happen. It seems to come from nowhere quite often, so when you start an album, it’s difficult to conceive of the album existing – you can’t imagine what it is going to be at the end – and by the time you get to the end and it’s finished, you think that in some ways it always existed. Quite often you look back on the tracks and think, “How on earth did I write that?” There are times when you start on the track and you get quite a long way into it before you realize it just isn’t working, it’s not pressing your own buttons and you scrap it.

One track in particular that comes to mind is “Crimewave Monkeys” off the “Children Of Another God” album. It just wasn’t happening, so I sat down and was playing what I had to Dick, because he’s a really good sounding board and if he responds well, then I know I’m doing something right – for at least one other person anyway. He sat there and just went, “Hmm, interesting…” And “interesting” is the worst word you can hear, and you go, “No, no, no, it’s got to be more than just interesting!” So I was lost and didn’t know what to do, and he said, “Think of it like a movie. What would it look like on the screen? What would you write if you were writing a soundtrack for this to kick the track off?” And when I approached it from that way, suddenly it happened, and I ended up with a track, which was completely different from the thing I started out with. It meant to literally hit the “Delete” button and start again from scratch. I need a little bit of external catalyst to send me off down the right path.

– At which point did you decide to use your own vocals, to be singing lead? It didn’t happen from the very beginning, right?

No, it started on “Children Of Another God” – on a track called “Identity Theft.” Usually, whenever I’m writing a song with lyrics, I’ll sing a guide vocal, and up to that point, it never occurred to me that guide vocals were ever going to be useful – or usable. But when I did the guide vocal for that track, I thought, “Actually, that’s not so bad. I’ll work on this!” And so I worked on doing it as best I could, and it stayed. I thought I was going to get some rotten tomatoes, and people would say, “He shouldn’t be singing!” – but nobody did. In fact, some people were quite nice about it, which surprised me and encouraged me to do some more on later albums. And now I’ve got to the point where I actually enjoy doing the singing, as long as it’s within my range. It has to be in my range and my dynamic because I can’t push my voice, it’s not a well-trained muscle at all. (Points at his throat and laughs.) If I sang more, there probably would be a wider range and a bit more dynamic out of it, but I sing what I’m comfortable doing – and as long as it fits the character, the context of the piece as well. So the tracks where other people are singing, it’s because their voice is much more suited and they can do a much, much better job than I can. It’s just a question of choosing the right person for the job. It always is, be it a voice or an instrument, if it’s people I can get access to. But I’m fortunate enough to have a little stable of musicians who I love working with – and hopefully, they like working with me – and who do the jobs that I just know I’m not right for.

– One of those people you’re continually working with is Tony Patterson. How did this friendship form?

He, as you probably know, sang in a band called REGENESIS, which is a GENESIS tribute band, and I always thought his performances were really first rate, because the thing that Tony does so well is, he acts – he understands the lyrics and he can act without without going over the top, without being cheesy in any way, and he can mold the tone of his voice to get the right mood across. I watched him many times in REGENESIS and met him after one of the gigs, and we became friends then. And a little while later, when I needed a voice for “Marduk” and I knew I couldn’t do it, I thought of Tony as I could hear his voice on it, so I gave him a ring and said, “Would you fancy having a go at this track?” He jumped at it, I was delighted with what he did, and that’s how it started. He really puts his own stamp on things, because Tony has a unique voice. He does get compared to a certain person quite a lot – we know who that is (laughs) – but I think people miss the point. Tony sounds like Tony to me and not like that other person, and that’s the voice I really like. He’s a joy to work with as well, so we spend more time laughing and fooling about than working, and he’s quite often my first-call singer, particularly for songs that need a rough edge and a bit of acting going on.

– Another singer is Pete Hicks. You worked with him in Hackett’s band and the two of you recorded this album called “Flat Pack” together that, again, sounds very different from everything you did, as it has this old-timey, nostalgic style. What that was the original idea to do it in this vein?

It’s Pete. They’re all Pete’s songs. I didn’t write anything.

– Uh, there’s a piece that’s credited to you and a couple of co-writes.

Oh, yes, there’s one piece, I don’t remember what it’s called now [“First Light”] – it’s the last track on the album. I wrote an instrumental piece for the end of it, but the actual songs are all Pete’s. And that kind of old-time feel with a touch of Americana is the style that he likes to do; he has what I think of as a sort of American approach to songwriting, from a certain era. But I love rising to the challenge of all sorts of music that I wouldn’t normally do, and sometimes there are things I know I can’t do: I’m no good at anything bluesy – I can’t play blues, and I’ve never have been able to. But anything with interesting melodies and chord structures, they’re an open book, and Pete left me to do arrangements that I felt complemented the songs. So it’s coming up with arrangements that work, that pull the best quality out of the songs, which is something I like to do – it takes me down a road that I wouldn’t normally go down.

– Is “A Strange Inheritance” something you’d normally do? It’s your seventh solo album – a lucky number – and you went to all points of the stylistic compass with it.

Sure, it’s approached things I wouldn’t normally do, and I think it’s mostly to do with a story – there’s a very distinct story with a narrative to it and different scenes in it. So I basically pulled out styles and colors, the sound palettes that fit various parts of the story. The piece on there that I’m particularly proud of is “Four Winds”: the eight-minute mini-symphony. I’ve never attempted to do anything that was purely orchestral on that scale. When I started writing it, its four distinct pieces were going to be linked by a piece of spoken or sung narrative, but it didn’t feel right. Dick had written these lyrics, and I couldn’t make it seem anything other than totally contrived, and in the end I decided that this had to work as an instrumental – one long suite where four sections would segue together as naturally as possible. And the challenge of making it sound realistic was a challenge I couldn’t resist. I thought, “I’m going to make this work!” – and hopefully I did, which encouraged me to maybe try more of the same in the future. I love doing the orchestral stuff – it gives me huge satisfaction, a special kind of satisfaction simply because I didn’t know if I could pull it off.

– I bet the name of your record label, Magick Nuns, gives you satisfaction too. I found this anagram of your name very funny. Who did think of that?

An anagram generator on the Internet did! (Laughs.) I just put my name into an anagram generator, and it came up with hundreds and hundreds results. Some were really funny and some were quite rude, but I spotted this one: Magick Nuns. I thought it was perfect.

– Let’s talk about your sessions and side projects, and start with CRY NO MORE. How did you get involved with that?

Through Chas Cronk, obviously. As you know, he played in the second iteration of Steve Hackett’s band, and we’ve always been good friends. He had this writing and working partnership with Roy Hill, CRY NO MORE, for years, and when they went out to do some gigs, he said, “Do you fancy joining in?” I did. Initially, I did it with a little drum machine and a drum pad MIDI-ed into it and I just played drums along with them, but that setup grew. We did two quite sizable tours – first supporting Suzanne Vega and the second one, the following year, supporting John Martyn – and for both of those I had a small keyboard rig, so I was able to do a rather fuller accompaniment to the songs. And it was great fun because Roy is a fantastic frontman: he’s got the rudest mouth on him you can imagine, and he loves to tell stories between songs. Occasionally, my equipment would play up, something would go wrong, like a disc not loading into the sampler – of course, these things always choose a moment on stage to misbehave, as in the studio they work perfectly – and Roy would go into an extended monologue about whatever. I really enjoyed doing those shows.

– You toured with Hackett, you toured with CRY NO MORE, which I didn’t realize, but who else did you go on the road with?

Nobody. Well, actually, no, not nobody. In 2010, John Hackett and I did a short series of gigs in England, supporting the Italian prog band THE WATCH. Lovely band, fantastic guys. We even went over to Italy and did a small tour with them there as well. That was the only other live touring thing I can think of, apart from THE ENID back back in 1976 when we played some concerts, isolated, one-off shows.

– Talking about Italy, was it there that you get to know Bernardo Lanzetti from PREMIATA FORNERIA MARCONI?

Bernardo Lanzetti? I don’t actually know him.

– But you played on his self-titled album!

It’s a mystery to me. You’ve intrigued me now. (Looks at the Discog’s entry.) Yes, I’m there in the list of credits, but there’s also a number of other people that I know well, John Perry, Dzal Martin, Rod Edwards, Nick Pentelow… And the one big clue about it is the engineer, Johnny Schinas. Now, I used to do a lot of recording sessions for various people down at a studio called Redan – which is where we recorded “Cured” – and the engineer on almost all of the other sessions that I did, the non-Steve ones, was Johnny. So whatever those tracks are, they’d have been recorded at Redan, but I don’t recognize any of the titles because they’re all in Italian. There’s so many sessions I did down there that a lot of them have faded into the mists of time, and I would have to hear it to remember what it was that I played on.

– What about a very unusual, for you, thing called FORCEFIELD, a hard rock project?

Through Ray Fenwick, who sadly is no longer with us. I did a lot of sessions with him, as he had quite a few projects that he produced and played on, and that was just one of them. So it wasn’t being a member of the band as such, it was just a recording session.

– So you didn’t get to meet Cozy Powell or any of the other players?

I didn’t. No. Like a lot of recording sessions, you generally tend to turn up and do your bit on your own, as everybody else has already recorded their parts.

– You played on “Time-Line” by RENAISSANCE. What tracks are you on?

As far as I know, I’m on all of them. (Laughs.)

– But Peter Gosling and Eddie Harding are credited on the album too.

They would have done additional keyboards – whatever I didn’t play, they did. I didn’t do all the keyboards on all the tracks, but I did a good deal of them.

– It’s interesting that you, who sound orchestral, arrived at these sessions when RENAISSANCE stopped being symphonic, and when there were tensions between Annie Haslam and Mike Dunford on one side and Jon Camp on the other. Did you feel it?

I know a lot of people feel that they lost their way with that album because it didn’t have that sort of symphonic, orchestral feel that their earlier material had. Obviously, I wouldn’t have been party to any of the core band discussions that they would have had about it, but I think it was Jon’s idea to become more commercial. It was very much around that same time when “Cured” came out, so there was the same pressure. Still, the dynamic in the band seemed fine, and everyone was really nice.

– Did you come on board thanks to John Acock or to Jon Camp?

John Acock.

– He also introduced you to Claire Hamill, and you played on her “Love In The Afternoon” in the late Eighties.

John was very good at recommending me for various jobs. We must have spent a good week recording all of that album at Claire’s house in Sussex, where she had a studio, and it was a lovely experience. Claire was an absolute delight.

– And “In The Snow” by MUNGO JERRY?

It was myself and friends who I worked with on various other things – I think the connection was made through Raphael Preston who used to work with Vangelis. I’ve known Raph for years. When MUNGO JERRY as such ceased to exist and Ray Dorset was doing his own thing, still trading under the MUNGO JERRY brand, he’d written a number of songs which he wanted produced. The “In The Snow” maxi-single also featured the song “Yellow Gloves” – Raph and I produced both these tracks.

– You mentioned Dick Foster as an external catalyst for your albums, and Chas Cronk mentioned you along the same lines when it came to “Touch The Earth” that he recorded with Dave Lambert. How would you describe your role in that project?

I’m not sure. Did I survive on those recordings? I don’t know if I did. We’d spent a lot of time making demos of the songs on a portastudio in the flat I was living in at the time. The two of them came over and we put these demos down, and then we went into a studio in Shepperton – Shepperton Film Studios has a recording studio attached as well – and I remember spending a day or two, maybe more, going there and recording these tracks. But I was unaware that if an album came out of that. I never got a copy. (Pretends to be angry.) Where’s my copy?

– Tell me, please, about CHINA CRISIS’ “Flaunt The Imperfection” and your work with Walter Becker.

Oh, that was three weeks of pure pleasure that we spent doing that in a studio called Parkgate, down near Hastings. I was terrified at the idea of going to work with Walter Becker because, you know, it’s Walter Becker! But he turned out to be the nicest, most encouraging producer I’ve ever worked with. You get to do a lot of sessions with various producers, and some of them literally put their feet up on the mixing desk and read a newspaper, and hit the talkback button going, “Do it again!” But Walter really threw himself into the whole thing. Again, he gave me pretty much free rein to do whatever I wanted. That was quite a memorable period of time.

– You also played on James Warren’s "Burning Questions"…

Yes, Once again, thanks to John Acock.

– …did James ever invited you to join THE KORGIS?

No. Quite often I see things, like Wikipedia entries or biographies of me that other people have written, that say I was in THE KORGIS. No, I wasn’t! I always think of that album as THE KORGIS album that THE KORGIS didn’t make, but it was very much James’ thing. He’s a great person to work with, he’s phenomenal. All his vocals were pretty much the first take, and then he’d double-track himself and it would be perfect. I’ve never come across anybody who could do that so perfectly as James. He’s a real perfectionist.

– But you didn’t seem too obvious a choice for “Life On Mars” by Johnny Mars.

Now, that was an unusual one, because I said earlier that I can’t play blues, and of course, Johnny Mars is very bluesy. The band there was: Ray on guitar, Johnny on harmonica and vocals, Terry Pack on bass, Pete Shaw on drums and me on keyboards. I’ve known Terry for years and years, he used to be in THE ENID, although he joined after, and we’ve wrote a lot of songs together. He comes from a group of musicians that are down on the Sussex coast, and Pete Shaw is one of those musicians too. So that gig came through Terry and Ray who said, “Do you want to come and do this album?” I was not sure whether I was going to be able to do it or not, but Ray went, “Of course, you can, man! It’s easy!” And one of the things that actually made it quite pleasurable was that we did it in the “Herne Place Studios” which Eddie Hardin used to have, in a town called Sunningdale. The studio doesn’t exist anymore, the whole place was knocked down and replaced with a housing estate some years ago. Eddie had a B3 Hammond there, and I rarely had had the opportunity to record on a real Hammond with a Leslie cabinet, but it was great – just the pleasure of playing that huge machine was great! It made up for all my misgivings about playing blues. I was busking furiously throughout and half the time I didn’t know what I was doing, but we managed to record the entire album in one day. That doesn’t happen very often these days; it usually takes people months and months, if not years, to record albums. I thought they could get somebody better to do this, but they had faith in me, although I’m not sure whether I’m mixed that loudly and whether you’re going to hear what I’m playing too clearly. And then we went out and did some gigs as well. Oh, you asked about who else I toured with, and I completely forgotten about that. We did a number of gigs with Johnny Mars around Germany, which was interesting.

– No Hammond on stage?

No Hammond, just a Yamaha DX7.

– There are very portable Hammonds now. A few years ago I attended Brian Auger‘s concert, and Brian, a famous Hammond player, had something much smaller than B3, but the sound was the same.

Yeah, there’s some really great Hammond clone keyboards you can get now. The Nord keyboards are particularly good at doing that, and Yamaha have one, YC-something: both of those are really good Hammond impersonators. Quite often, watching TV programs – for instance, “Later… with Jools Holland” – I see so many of the bands with these Nord keyboards, and quite often the band will start playing, and I’ll be going, “Oh, God, there must be a real Hammond! That sounds great!” And then the camera will pan around to the keyboard player, and there he is in front of this red plank. It sounds great, so yeah, you don’t really need to take the big one around anymore.

– Another instrument that you’re not really associated with, although you mentioned Steve Hackett adding it to your sonic palette, is the Mellotron. And still, you ended up on “The Mellotron Album: Rime Of The Ancient Sampler”.. How come?

That was an interesting project which came about through a friend of mine, Gordon Reid, who knew John Bradley, the son of Les Bradley, the owner of Streetly Electronics that made the Mellotron. John’s business partner is Martin Smith, so I met the two of them through Gordon, and we’ve been friends since. Martin had this idea of making an album featuring Mellotrons, and all sorts of people contributed to it, me being one of them. Now, I’ve never owned a Mellotron of my own – I use some virtual ones, samples of Mellotron in all forms.

– Which I guess never get out of tune, unlike the real thing.

Well, a well-maintained one won’t go out of tune; it’s when they get old and cranky that they go wrong, so when you get a good one, they work. But yes, the advantage of the sampled ones is that they generally don’t break down.

– So you used a real or sampled one on that album?

A sampled one. In fact – (in a jokingly conspiratorial tone) don’t say I said so – but most of the people that contributed to it used sampled ones and only a couple of people used the real thing. I know Woolly Wolstenholme did, but I can’t remember who else. And I think a fair amount of criticism was thrown at the album because of that.

– And after all this, you’re still most famous for playing with Steve Hackett. A bit unjust, won’t you say?

No, no, it’s not, because without that, I don’t know where I would be now. If I never got that gig, for all I know, I’d be working on the checkout at a supermarket saying, “Do you have a club card? You need any cash back?” Who knows what would have happened if it weren’t for Steve. Without that, I wouldn’t have anything of a career. Well, who knows? I might have done, but it would have been down a completely different path.