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Professionally,
since January, 1967. We started out before
that as a completely blues and Bo Diddley-oriented
rock 'n' roll band from a school of architecture.
Have any of the group had a classical
musical background?
Richard's [organist Richard
Wright] had a little bit of classical
training, but the rest of us haven't had
any training of any sort.
But we've all been through the great
Music College of Life.
When did you decide to get off the
Bo Diddley trip and involve yourselves
in the experimental music you're into
now?
In June or July of 1966; by that
time we'd already started to do the things
that we continue to do. Even though we
were still amateur, we stopped playing
blues and started thrashing about making
stranger noises and doing different things.
Some people saw us and they said, "We
think you boys can be big," and we
said, "Too much!" and they said,
"Let's get started" and we said,
"We're terribly sorry, but we're
going off on a holiday, and we'll be back
in October." And so we did. And then
we raised two hundred pounds and went
into a studio and cut a record and took
it to EMI and said, "Look, we can
be bigger than The Beatles." And
they said, "Golly, gee whiz, we think
you're right!" and we signed a stupid
contract with them, which we're still
bound by, and they released the album
and it was a medium-big seller. Then we
went professional.
Were your concerts the same in performance
as the album?
We didn't do concerts in those days.
Nobody did concerts in those days, and
we hadn't done an album anyway. There
weren't concerts in those days -- there
were ballrooms. If you were a working
group with a hit single, you played in
ballrooms. It was a hall like this [the
PNE Gardens in Vancouver], but without
seats, and it was all screaming girls...
And jiving, twisting...
We cleared more ballrooms than you've
had hot dinners. We didn't play the singles
on stage, which was all they wanted to
hear.
The only reason you'd get those bookings
is because you had hit singles. That's
how you'd get the work. And we didn't
do them.
We had a very rough year or so...
Apart from a few gigs in London.
We had a very rough time until the
second album came out, and people were
coming to see us because of Saucerful
of Secrets, not some hit single that they'd
heard.
Did you tour on the Continent?
Not for a very long time.
We came to the States very early
on just for a week or so.
We came to the States right in the
middle of '68, when the second album came
out, for seven weeks. But that was pretty
bad because we didn't have any of our
own equipment. We hadn't got it together
either to cope with any equipment problems
or things like that.
But the Continent has just exploded
for us now -- particularly France. It's
all quite new. France is maybe a year
old right now, since we started getting
anywhere in France. What really made it
for us in France was the film More, for
which we did the soundtrack. It was playing
in Paris at two next-door cinemas at once
it was so popular.
Have you ever gotten involved with
modern classical musical -- anything symphonic,
for example?
Not really. On our new album we've
used some written music, some other musicians...
Ten symphonic brass players and a
choir of twenty.
But the result is kind of a very
direct attempt at hitting emotions, touching
off emotional reactions with fairly ordinary
sounds.
Have you ever been invited to do
anything with a symphony?
Well, we've had our talks with people.
But the economics of working with an orchestra
are prohibitive.
Like this thing we've got on the
next album uses thirty musicians, which
isn't a lot of musicians. But it cost
us five thousand dollars a night to put
it on.
We're writing a ballet for Roland
Petit which will be on Paris next June,
and the sky's the limit for that. They're
spending so much money on that that they'd
be quite willing to pay for an orchestra.
But it might take it out of our hands
to a certain extent if the stuff had to
all be written down, because we can't
write it down ourselves, and there's always
a communication gap involved between what
you can sing or play on a piano and what
gets written down as music. And then you
never hear it until you've got the orchestra
there at the first rehearsal, and you
probably only get two rehearsals anyway,
so by the time you hear it, it's too late
to change it; whereas our stuff is all
based on doing something and then throwing
out and using something else.
So you'll probably be playing with
the ballet yourselves...
Yeah, it's going to be on for about
ten days. Nureyev is dancing the male
lead. On the program we're doing, we're
doing one ballet and Xenakis is writing
the other.
A lot of people when talking about
Pink Floyd use the term "cosmic"...
Yeah, I know what you mean. That's
the reaction we get from lots and lots
of people, but I think the new album's
going to come as something of a surprise,
because it's not "cosmic". All
they mean really are that the sounds we
make evoke images of deep space.
There are a lot of other things we
do that do evoke quite strong images in
the same way, but not about space.
I wondered if there was some kind
of philosophy about this in the group,
or if it's just the audience's interpretation.
Not really. There is a general feeling,
I suspect, in the group that music that
really works is music that touches your
emotions and triggers off something unchanging,
some kind of eternal response. Like, it's
really difficult to describe your reactions
to a piece of music that hits you, gives
you a particular kind of feeling, a particular
kind of feeling that transcends the normal
ups and downs and ins and outs.
How much equipment do you have? I
heard a rumour that it was worth about
a hundred thousand dollars.
That's probably a bit of an exaggeration.
It's probably worth about thirty thousand
dollars.
Well, how many speaker systems do
you have around the hall?
We have a quadrasonic sound system
around the hall, and there's a P.A. system
which is quite powerful and we all have
regular amps on stage.
How are the four speakers in the
hall used to augment what's on stage?
Well, you can feed tape into them
or you can feed the organ into them. You
could feed the guitar or the vocal into
them, but we don't because they're very
hard to work like that.
Who controls these effects?
Richard, the organist, has a quadrasonic
sound mixer on his organ, and he can play
the organ and the sound around the auditorium
as he's doing it. The tape recorder's
operated by Pete, our road man.
How did you pick up all these experimental
effects and techniques? Did you learn
them from anybody?
No, they just happened, really. We
just thought "You ought to be able
to do this," and then we went and
saw somebody who knew something about
electronics and asked, "Is it possible?"
Like the quadrasonic thing, we just went
to one of the maintenance engineers at
Abbey Road in London where we record,
and we said, "Look, we want to do
this. Can you build it?" and he said
"Yes" and he did.
Has EMI said anything about releases
on the new four-track tapes?
EMI will do it when everyone else
has done it.
They'll do it in a couple of years
after everyone else. They're so technically
far behind the other studios.
How many more albums are you under
contract to them for?
It's not a question of albums --
we're under contract to them for another
eighteen months.
What then -- will you be starting
an independent label?
We don't know. It depends. We might
build our own studio.
Have you played any pop festivals
-- like the one in Paris?
This summer that's all we've done
between our last American tour and this
American tour -- festivals: the Bath Festival,
the Rotterdam Festival, two in France...
One in Germany. Not many -- about
half a dozen. We haven't done any in the
States. I don't like them.
Why not?
The sound is generally so bad, and
there are too many people.
The atmosphere is always very difficult
for us, because we like people not to
just think, "Well, here's the next
group coming on," and then get straight
into it, because it's very difficult to
get straight into our music like that.
We like to set an atmosphere. We like
to have a place where we're the only people
performing.
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