.. nylon-string guitar for instance sounds unnervingly ambivalent and jangly as a result, especially in the top three strings. Not to mention that my right ear is so shot to pieces that I prefer to wear an ear plug rather than a hearing aid when I’m playing or listening to even slightly amplified music, as any prolonged noise provokes a bout of tinnitus that lasts the rest of the day – or even longer if I push on regardless.
As if the problems of playing and listening to music weren’t enough, recording music is even more problematic. We’re all very used to stereophonic sound on recordings representing the reality of a musical performance, but imagine if your right ear was blocked (my right ear sounds as though I’ve got a sock stuffed into it) with the result that you only hear about half the volume with it as you can with your left ear. It’s enough to make you yearn for good old mono again, unstrangely the identical opinion of another, if better known tin-ear dude, The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.
I’m still wrestling with this stuff in both the live arena and in the studio. Quite honestly it’s not conducive to enthusiasm for the next gig or the next session in the studio. A possible solution is to wind back the Spectrum gigs in favour of more genteel solo appearances and in this endeavour I’ve been presented with an opportunity to kick-start the process with a high-profile solo gig at Adelaide’s Fringe Festival. Not that I’ve never done a solo gig before, but it’s a comparatively recent development and one in which I’m still finding my way after decades in my comfort zone of playing in a band.
I’m also thinking of adding a couple of support players to these ‘solo’ appearances in future (Adelaide’s Geoff Miller is helping out on bass for a few numbers at the German Club) but in addition to a bassist I’m thinking of adding a piano-accordion player.
Gasp! How times have changed! The thought of a piano-accordionist would reduce us to paroxysms of scornful laughter in the early days. We considered the piano-accordion to be the antithesis of rock and roll, which is simply an arrogant and ignorant assumption – think of Cajun music for instance.
I was influenced by the band Traffic in the early days and as a result one of my priorities was to have a Hammond organ central to the band’s sound. You could think of the piano-accordion as a portable Hammond if you like, but in any case I’ve always thought my guitar style very complementary to the sounds of a keyboard and vice versa so I’m going to give it a go.
Anyway, it’s been in the course of this cluster of interviews that I made the point that I didn’t start off my career as a singer-songwriter, (like Ross Ryan for example), that I was just the singer and rhythm guitarist in my first band, The Chants, which was essentially a covers band anyway, and it wasn’t until The Party Machine disbanded that I even considered writing my own songs and putting together my own band to play them.
I’ll Be Gone might’ve been the first song that I wrote for Spectrum (or The Spectrum as we were originally known), but the songs were pretty slow in coming at first and so we padded the repertoire out with Traffic covers and Ross Wilson’s Party Machine songs, clearly my two biggest influences in those early days.
To compensate for my sparse output we made the songs that I did manage to come up with quite long affairs, and fortunately we had a fine keyboardist in Lee Neale and a prodigy on drums in Mark Kennedy who could stretch the songs with tastefully constructed solos that in most cases became intrinsic to the songs’ arrangements. You could argue that our reputation as a ‘progressive’ band, largely bestowed on the strength of the Spectrum Part One album, was all down to expediency at the time.
So, what lies ahead for Spectrum? Firstly I should say that I hope that Spectrum can continue on playing live and recording in some form or other. Obviously we can’t go on forever and more particularly we can’t go on the way we’re going for very much longer at all. I would like to see Spectrum performing at a higher level and I think that means we’ll be performing less often. And while I’m thinking of it, I would like to expand the membership to include another guitarist/singer and perhaps even a female instrumentalist/singer.
In the end I’m just happy to be able to be considering options. Time passes and I want to be able to keep doing what I most like to do, and if that means ch..ch..ch..ch..changes then so be it.