STEVE BYRNE (SONS OF LIBERTY)
Q: Bristol's not the likeliest place for it to form, is it?
SB: No. Not for Southern. Back in the midst of time, the two guitarists, Fred and Muse - I think Muse was buying another one of his guitars - they went off together and on the way, they have Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchett, Blackfoot, Blackberry Smoke, Blackstone Cherry, Allman Brothers on a playlist, listening to it going, ‘No buggers playing this stuff. We ought to put a band together to do it’. So, they put the feelers out. They knew Mark and Rob and Mark knew me through helping out the Metal covers band that I played in with him.
Q: Where you were already a Southern Rock fan?
SB: Yeah. I never got to see Skynyrd original but I saw them about five years ago and I'd seen Blackfoot supporting the Scorpions. They'd done a short set. gone off after about 35 minutes but then came back on. The crowd were going ballistic. So they finished off, obviously, with Highway Song and the whole place erupted. I was actually quite disappointed in the Scorpions after that. I mean, the Scorpions really had to up their game.
Q: So what's your background in?
SB: Edited highlights, my late auntie bought me a junior drum set (as opposed to a kid's drum set) when I was three, three and a half because she could see I was hitting things. At the age I was, I was massively into the Beatles so I play along to all the BBC Live programme and the Beatles singles and then when I was six, my mum said, “Right, you're not playing drums anymore, I've had enough of this, you're going to go play a decent instrument” she sent me off to play piano, because she played piano. So I did piano until I was fourteen. I was two exams from qualifying as a piano teacher at fourteen - I was that good - but like all teenagers, I started to, well, I was more into other things. Sabbath, Purple, Zeppelin, Floyd, and wanting to play that stuff but she was like “No, you can't play that!” So I thought, “I've had enough of this” fuck that, I'm going back to drums and stopped with the teacher, obviously without saying ‘fuck that’ to her. (laughs) I had some money of my own from premium bonds, cashed it all in, went out and bought a drum kit, and been playing drums since then.
Q: You actually play double bass drums. Two drums and two pedals as opposed to the single pedal with two beaters many prefer these days.
SB: I’ve been playing double bass drums since 1982 when there wasn't that many doing double bass drums around. It was a new album kind of stuff. Mooney (Keith Moon) had one, of course, but my idol was Cozy Powell. I was playing in a prog band called Multistory and that's why I had the full sweep of kit, two bass drums, so I could do the Neil Peart and Genesis stuff and whatever else. I've got a double pedal in the car, just in case and I use the double pedal in restricted venues.
Q: Did you ever meet your hero?
SB: The very first Schenker tour and I walked right past him! (laughs) My best mate was screaming at me. “Steve! Come here! Turn around! Who have you just walked past” and I could see Cozy stood there. It was the end of the show. He walked onto the stage and was packing up and whatever else so I just said, do you mind a chat and he went “No, no, no. You're more than welcome”. So we chatted as he was doing all his stuff on the stage and it was a lovely fifteen minutes.
Q: Steve, great to talk to you. Thanks very, very much.
SB: No, you're welcome.
A NEW DAY 2025
17th August 2025
Z MACHINE
Owen Rosser, Lester Greenhalgh, Gareth Piper
Q: Well, excellent set. Enjoyed it?
LG: Yeah.
GP: Yeah, it went very well.
Q: Is this your first time here?
LG: Yes.
Q: How was it? Everything was good?
LG: Yes. Everything was really smooth. The sound on stage was very good.
GP: It’s a good set-up. The stage crew were absolutely phenomenal. The sound guy was good. I said to them afterwards, one of the great things about what we did here was that the sound on stage was really good. Sometimes you go places and the monitoring is crap. Because you can hear everything, we could play better because we could hear exactly what was going on.
Q: There was already t-shirts in the audience...
GP: Yeah, in the front row they were all there.
OR: It was from last year, maybe at Tannerfest…they came to see us down there.
Q: There's been a resurgence of what I see in the UK, of Psychedelic or Prog or whatever in the last 10 years. What do you put that down to?
OR: Oh, maybe a bit of a kickback with popular music maybe...looking for other stuff.
GP: I think maybe the popular music, as you might want to call it if you like the chart stuff, it's become overproduced a bit and I think people have started looking for something that isn't just the same and there's also a retro thing going on.
LG: Yeah.
GP: As you can probably tell, I'm a few years older than these guys, and we have the same conversations about bands that I'm enthusing about. It’s all moved on in the audience, instead of being older, it's becoming more mixed and these are bands that are, you know, what we would call traditional Prog bands. King Crimson, Gong, maybe early Genesis, Tull, and there's the Metal influence as well which is more from these guys (nods to Owen and Lester). It's a big melting pot, really. There's a lot of enthusiasm for music that's got something a bit more interesting. Not the same all the way through, not metronomic. They want something that’s changing, grabbing their interest as much as, if you like, a stage presence. We don't have a real lead singer. It's all instrumental and there's always a risk with instrumental that you're not going to grab the audience because they like a singer. They like that interaction from a singer.
OR: I think another big factor as well is that it's a lot easier to record your music. Now you don't necessarily have to book into a studio for extensive studio time. So if you want to try new ideas in the studio, you can do it at home. It's a lot easier to have a digital workstation at home. You can have amp plug-ins, you can have bass, all kinds of stuff. So if you want to write, record, and produce an album at home, you can. It's not like in the 60s, 70s, 80s where you absolutely had to go to a studio. You're not working on someone else's dollar, and you can do it in your own time. Everyone with a laptop and an audio interface can make their own stuff. It's easy for you to experiment.
GP: Going back to the resurgence of Prog thing, something that I've noticed from the gigs that we've done is people aren't just saying, oh, it's a great gig. They're more impressed than they used to be a few years ago with the fact you can play. They can seem to be going, oh, that was a great bit of drumming, oh, that was a great bit of guitar, oh, I loved your solo. They seem to be listening more and more appreciative of the fact that they're looking at a group of musicians. That seems to have turned around. They're actually appreciating the fact you put an awful lot of bloody hours in. So I think that's made a difference.
Q: You guys do a lot of festivals and there is an abundance of festivals these days in the UK. How important are the smaller festivals to you?
LG: Well, it's where we started, really. Playing things like KozFest, Dr. Sardonicus down in Cardigan, the Tanner Fest as well. I mean, we played at Bloodstock last weekend, which is a major UK festival, but we played on one of the smaller stages.
GP: If you advertise a gig and say this is a Prog band or this is a Rock Fusion band or whatever, people know what they're going to get. They go, ‘Mmm, don't really like that’ but if you play a festival, you've got a melting pot of people there, and all of a sudden they're thinking, ‘Wow, I like this’ so you're opening yourself up to an audience you wouldn't normally get.
OR: That was especially true at Bloodstock because we're not a Metal band. We've got heavy bits that could be described as Metal influences, maybe but we've got Simon, who runs a lot of the stuff at Bloodstock. I know he likes his Prog, and he sort of wants stuff. So we shot him up an email, and he put us on. We turned up and played, and people went, ‘What the hell's that? This is different, this is new.’ They loved it. Then you've got this sort of, almost the opposite case here, where everyone's a Prog fan. They all like their Prog and their Psych and stuff.
LG: All kinds.
OR: All kinds, yeah. So the audience is sort of already waiting and as you could see, we've got five or six people in the front.
GP: The concern for me at Bloodstock - these guys have been before but I had never been – was are we going to be in the wrong place? Would we just be a curiosity?
LG: That was one of my concerns about playing it as well but we were so warmly received.
GP: We are a little bit different, and they seem to appreciate. They're like, wow, what's this?
OR: Then the opposite. These guys love their Prog, they love their Psychedelia, they love their off-the-wall sort of stuff but we get just the same reaction. So it's nice that we can go lots of places. People, for one reason or another, either being a little bit different or being exactly what you want them to be, you get some nice responses.
Q: How much social media and stuff do you do promotion? Is that really important to you?
LG: It is now. It's having to be.
OR: You've got to be better at it than you used to, I think. We weren't fantastic at it, but Maddy, our bass player, joined last year. She's really up on that sort of stuff, so that's helped a lot in how we put ourselves across on social media. It's an ongoing thing, trying to be better at it, finding out what works and what doesn't work.
GP: It's something we've got to develop. What we've got very well sorted in the band, is a kind of democratic division of labour, if you like. We've all got different skills, and her skill is getting the social media stuff sorted out. So horses for courses. She's running with that and loves doing it.
Q: What's yours?
GP: I drive the van; I enjoy the van. (laughs) What do I contribute apart from driving the van?
OR: Patience. Endless patience. (all laugh)
Q: How about yourself?
OR: I find myself doing quite a lot of the admin when it comes to organising gigs the logistics. Lester was in charge of the van for organising this, but I am normally along with the accommodation and make sure we know where we're going and when to get there and what we need to do when we get there.
GP: That sort of thing. Rob and I split a little bit of the accounting figure work as well. He's very good on that. He takes care of the merchandising. It's a very good division of labour.
Q: What are you up to after this?
OR: We'll probably hang around for a bit and see a few bands…
Q: No, no, no. Not today…generally.
GP: We are booked in for Nene Valley Festival in Lincoln.
LG: That's a couple of weeks.
OR: Hard Rock Hell Prog, we are on that.
Q: You are covering all the bases.
LG: We've got a couple of local gigs coming up. We've got one with Dirty Sound Magnum. It's a Swiss, blues, Psychedelic band in Swansea.
OR: We've got one that's currently being organised for the end of September down in Swansea as well with a band called Cities.
GP: We've done less in the local area to us. Because it's limited...
LG: We don’t want to oversaturate there.
GP: What it is useful for is when we rehearse new material, you can do a local gig and run it out before you bring it to something like this. As you get that stuff nailed and say that works, then you bring it out to something else.
OR: And sometimes it's fun just to be able to drive home warm in 15 minutes. (all laugh)
Q: Absolutely. Gentlemen, thank you very much for this much appreciated.
All: Thank you. Your welcome, thanks for your time.
SPLINK
Andy Crickett, Matt James, Vikki Ings
(The members joined over the course of half an hour. We start with Andy)
Q: So Andy, you’re the newest recruit.
AC: I joined a month before the pandemic. The previous bass player, Steve Butler, he had a lot on and had to leave to get family responsibilities sorted and a friend of my wife's book club - well, they're called book clubs, aren't they? They're mostly there for drinking - knew of Matt and knew of his need and knew of the style of music and said, you need to go and audition for this and I said, yeah, definitely do. So, yeah, I've joined since 2019 and since that time, we've done two albums and a third on the way. Kosmosis was our debut album in this format, this line-up and then followed by Magnifique Eccentrique, which we did a couple of years ago. The songs that you heard, at New Day, at least half of them were from our upcoming album.
(Matt joins)
Q: The credo of the band Matt is no-rules music. I like that. How did it come about?
MJ: I would say I'm very lucky to be in a band where Andy is an incredibly talented musician and learned as well and proficient on piano, bass, guitar and all sorts of things. Vikki is obviously classically trained and also about grade 7 piano or something. Tim (Chapman), the drummer, is jazz-trained as well and has done all sorts of things. I've actually been playing with Tim since we were in our 20s, so that's a number of years. (laughs) I went out and bought a guitar when I was about 16 just made it up. So I'm not trained at all and I play everything by ear, so I've got no rules, the same as most musicians have. Everything is about the accumulative effect of the members of Splink. We are equal to the sum of our whole, if you like, or whatever the phrase is. Andy's far more educated than me, he can say that better…
AC: Sum of our parts.
MJ: Yeah, sum of our parts, that's it. But I don't have any rules because I just make it up. Obviously, I know note names now and stuff like that but I couldn't recite you every note down the neck or anything. Whereas someone who's a little bit more trained might go, well, you can't put that chord after that chord, it should be this.
Q: So the others being classically trained, do they ever get to the point where they go, “Actually, you're playing suspended fourth there and it really should be a diminished seventh?”
AC: We've done it a couple of times.
MJ: It's more likely to be Andy saying that.
AC: Yeah, it's usually the chord names that I'm saying, well, we should try this inversion. You head round it and say, “You know the funny one that looks like the staircase?” And then it goes, “All right.” (laughs) I think also in terms of overall our music is that we're open to a lot of strands of different genres and like to explore those. Back to being progressive when it meant actually pushing boundaries and joining and melding loads of different genres so if we want to suddenly do some sort of gothic waltz, we're okay. If we want to do a space funk disco song, we'll fit that in. If we suddenly want to segue into some dub reggae, we'll do that. All of those have been used in our songs in the past and the future. So we try and join all of that, but no rules idea is to try and get as many strands and capabilities as we can all joined together to make the music that's Splink.
Q: Okay but actually having no rules, that put you in a no genre category? Does that make it more difficult to get gigs?
AC: No, we seem to fit in fairly well. We've kind of played at venues and gigs where it's been very space rock orientated, you'd say more psychedelic.
We've fitted in on different parts where the bands have been more folk orientated...
MJ: We've played with electronica bands, one famously being System 7 with Steve Hillage.
AC: You wouldn't think that that would work for the evening, Splink and then trance music from Steve Hillage but it was a fantastic night. Everyone really enjoyed it.
MJ: It was a lovely journey. I think that's what it's about. I think that's what it's about and yes, it is hard to get gigs because we're playing original music but I think it's hard for all bands that are playing original music now to get gigs. If you're playing covers, then you can get paid a good wage and play very regularly all over the place but I've seen some amazing bands in venues with 25 people in there and it's sad, really. The music industry has changed somewhat and it's thanks to events like A New Day Festival that put on the small and the large together that give us that exposure, really.
Q: That’s an important point and I will come back to that later. For now, I want to ask you, when you write, I mean, you said you might come up with something, Matt, and then you give it to the band. How do you write, especially as you have different parts within a song, which, as you say, can go from Space Rock to anything at all. How do you start to put those together?
MJ: Well, it comes to me in different ways. It could just be that I'm sitting here and playing on the acoustic and I come up with a little pattern or a riff and then in the back of my mind I can hear what chords are going to sound nice with that and then suddenly you get all excited and the transitions start to come up. That might not always be the right thing, but then I'll go in with an idea. During the pandemic, there's one track we've got called “Greenlands” and that was done at home. I just got this little riff on the acoustic. I then put some other bits and pieces over it and chords and keyboards and some ambient sounds and I made this whole suite, which was about 50 minutes long, and sent it to everyone and said, see if you can play something over this.
It was a presented idea, but usually it's just, I've got this sort of thing or we might have a jam or Tim might come up with a drum pattern and then we'll suddenly start playing something over it and then the excitement begins. It's play that bit again, do that bit, let's try doing this and everyone looks at me a bit funny sometimes when I say, no, stay on that, stay on that pattern for a little while. No, another eight bars of this and Andy's like getting frustrated because I think we should have another chord change here. Then the tension sort of begins and then you come out with this thing. I’m fortunate I've got these amazing musicians that can facilitate that and make me sound a lot better than I am. It’s not all my ideas though.
AC: Usually, it's very organic. Matt comes prepared with a few ideas and I'll add what I feel would suit that song. I always treat the bass as being the glue to the mechanism. I'm the cog in the machine to get everything moving so I will add my part and that will take us in a different direction. Vikki will start to use her melodies and try and build those in and that will also take us in a different direction. By the time it's come in, it's gone out the end of the Splink machine as something adapted and completely different. But, you know, a lot of things at the moment, we've got a lot of writing done by Vikki herself who's writing a lot of lyrics, a lot of songs, a lot of ideas and structure behind those. She's coming out of her shell far more. Being classically trained, she wants everything written down in note notation - which isn't great for me. (laughs) She's really developed as a songwriter and a structuralist and thematic one; she's quite the polymath, also doing all our album cover designs.
MJ: Yeah, Vikki is amazing in that respect.
Q: How strict are you on stage with your arrangements? Do you ever just wander off into something else?
AC: Broadly speaking, we tried it. Some members of the band find that more challenging. If we start to dip off to different arrangements, whereas Matt and I will definitely go, yeah, we're quite happy jamming on one idea for a long time. Broadly speaking, we practice a lot. We really get our ideas together for that set list, that particular set list chosen to fit in the time schedule and for the things that we want to bring along and the songs that we want to present. We really do rehearse it quite strongly and get it down to exactly on the wire because you get given 45, 50 minutes precisely, and you get told with a big sign saying, you've got five minutes left. We try to be very professional and never go over time. There are sections where Vikki and I definitely know that Matt will go on to a different sort of thing. He will try and stretch out. He will use his solos and we will follow him until we got that down and we’ve finished that section. So it's both. It's structured, it's rehearsed and ready to go for these festivals but also there's room for manoeuvre inside certain sections of the song.
MJ: There is a trick - this is only me - I learnt off of listening to Frank Zappa and Soft Machine because they tend to sort of go off wandering with guitar and then suddenly, they can bring everything back in and you think, well, “How do they do that?” The way they do it, if you listen carefully, is that they'll have a signalling riff or pattern that says, listen everyone, I'm doing this now. So about to come back. We can really sort of do that in tracks like “Canterbury.” If I want to go off, you know, making a racket out on the guitar, as soon as I play a certain riff, Vikki knows that everyone's coming back in so we've all got a safe zone.
Q: Coming to the festival itself, how important are these small festivals to bands like yourselves?
AC: It's those sorts of festivals that spread the word for Progressive music and they turn up a lot. They're reviewed in Prog Mags so we see ourselves there. They're essential to us moving up in terms of venues, earnings, gig time. They really are. We see a lot of those bands around those small festivals, ones like Summer's End, Winter's End, A New Day, Nene, Valley Festival. We played those a couple of times and they really prepare you and move you forwards into the areas like Cropredy and trying to do some of the other larger festivals.
(Vikki joins and apologises for being late)
Q: We’ve just been talking about the no-rules music and you being classically trained, you obviously have rules. Does that conflict internally with you, coming in and breaking the rules?
VI: We have a lot of those conversations but to be honest, I think that's what makes our music really good. Matt and I obviously often have discussions and I'm often trying to make things fit into steps of four and I traditionally don't like it whenever patterns go on for too long because I'm not used to that in the kind of music I've either played or listened to but I'm learning to be more flexible in that. Then in other ways, I think the things that I put forward at a different angle to what Matt or Andy are doing add to the music. We all push and pull in different ways and then we have a very strong ethos of trying to make sure that whatever we agree on everybody agrees on. So, we might push and pull for a while but whatever we settle on generally everybody's happy with it. I haven't got a history of listening to music like we play like the others do so I'm sort of learning from the inside out whereas most people would have listened and then learnt to play I'm learning to play and then appreciating more from the listening outside of that. I'm sort of understanding it more from the inside out which is quite interesting.
Q: we have to wrap this up so briefly, what’s the future for Splink?
VI: World domination!
At A New Day, I went up to Dave Rees the organiser and said thank you for putting us on because after years and years and years of trying to play places like HRH Prog and all these other fusion festivals, suddenly people listened to us and took note and it is thanks to people like Dave Rees who puts on that festival and puts us on. He trusts this little band that's got half a dozen followers and gives us that exposure. He really does make dreams come true.
Q: That’s a lovely note to end on, thank you all.
All: Thanks for having us..take care…bye bye
DORIS BRENDEL
Q:Hello Doris, how you doing?
DB: Oh God, I'm having the worst six weeks. It's just been horrible. I've had so many things go wrong.
Q: I've read your blog.
DB: Funny enough, I'm just updating it, because more has happened and it's just like, will it ever end?
Q: Yes, it will Doris, I promise you. I went backstage to catch you a bit later after your show, and there you were, on the floor, your eyes were just staring into nothing, and an ambulance guy over you with a drip in your arm. I was freaked to say the least!
DB: I’m ok now. I knew the night before that I wasn’t well. I felt I was coming down with something - you know when you just feel a little bit out of sorts?
Q: Yeah...
DB: And I didn't sleep very well, and I thought, well, I only have to get through the gig and then I can go home and rest, so it'll be fine. So I knew but I didn't know what that something was. I did the show and that was good, and my throat was hurting a little bit, and then did the merch, and everything was OK. Then when I was watching one of the bands, I started feeling really dizzy, and I thought, oh, my God!
I rushed backstage, and I had to sit down and I thought, no, I'm going to have to have a lie down. Now, the thing is, I've got low blood pressure. A lot of people who are quite slim have got low blood pressure and when I'm ill, it can really tank, especially if I'm tired so I wasn't panicking. I just went to have a little lie down, but my bass player, Ewan, insisted on calling the paramedics. I said, “No, no, no, I've just got the flu or something” but he insisted on calling the paramedics. Hence, I was being poked and prodded and my temperature being taken with a thermometer in my ear, pricked fingers, and God knows what. They asked me if I had taken any drugs, no, had I had a drink, no, was I diabetic, no. I'm actually quite healthy and all it took in the end, after all that prodding, was me drinking a smoothie, and eating some chocolate, and necking loads of water because if you drink loads of water, you can't pass out.
Q: I never knew that.
DB: Yeah, I have to know these things, having low blood pressure. My main concern was getting home, because I had some driving to do and I thought, I need to get my blood pressure up before I can actually get home. So it was a bit of a worry but yeah, loads of water, and a smoothie, and some chocolate and I was fine until I got home and once I got home, I got really sick.
​
About 3am, I couldn't sleep, because my throat was hurting so much. It was the worst throat pain I've ever felt in my life. It was like razor blades and fire and I was having weird fever dreams. I can't take any morphine, because my brain goes into nightmare mode straight away. So my throat turned into a paint-by-numbers picture and it was number eight that was really hurting.
​
I thought, well, if I can delete number eight, then maybe the pain will go away. But then as soon as I tried to do that, it moved to number 13; this is what my brain is doing while I'm trying to sleep.
​
About three o'clock in the morning, I googled ‘really severe sore throat for 2025’ and up popped COVID. The latest strain of COVID has got really acute throat pain. So I went downstairs as I've still got some old test kits which were all out of date but I thought, I'll try it anyway and the second I put the dropper in, the COVID line went tadaaah! I’m fine now but for a few days, I had really bad sore throat… I sounded like the Honey Monster. Thank god that happened that day though and not the day before, because I wouldn't have been able to do the gig, even 12 hours before.
Q: Well, it was a hell of a gig. It was great fun. What a great festival, though.
DB: I really, really love that festival. And I've been doing mostly acoustic shows. So it's so nice to be able to do a show with a band again. I think we played at the New Day Festival it’s very first year and it was a bit of a day because we had two festivals in one day. I think we did New Day in the morning and then we travelled to, I think it was Cambridge, possibly Cambridge Rock Festival that we did in the evening.
Q: That voice of yours Doris, when did you discover you had it? That power and emotion that comes out…
DB: Well, that's not something you can control, is it? You know, we are gifted with a voice and that's what we've got. I think my voice is very restrictive in many ways. I can't do airy, fairy singing. I can't do clean, nice or girly vocals or pop music. There's a lot of things that my voice simply won't do and I'm a bit sad that it's so restrictive but then what it does have, it's got a tone that nobody else has so it's very unique in that sense. There's value in distinctiveness. My mother was an opera singer, and she was an alto so she actually had a sort of similar voice but it wasn't as distressed as mine. Every year it gets huskier and huskier because I've been gigging for more than 40 years and it's going to have an effect, but it works for blues and bluesy kind of singing and obviously, Prog as well.
Q: You were the winner of the HRH Prog Angel Award last year. Congratulations, that's quite an accolade.
DB: Do you know what Glenn? No one could be more surprised than me. I remember being nominated for it and I said to my guys, “Oh my God, this is exciting. I've never been nominated for anything”! I thought we were not going to win because we were up against much younger ladies than me with more budget and glossy videos but let's go there anyway. We'll have some free wine and we'll just bask in the glory of being nominated.
​
I will never forget it because we were sitting at the back on a bit of a winner's table as it turned out. It's a big do and it’s red carpet and there's hundreds of people there and the big stage at the end and each singer that was nominated on a big video screen. My clip came up and I got this massive cheer and I couldn't believe it because I was the only one who got a really big cheer from the audience. I remember looking at Lee (Dunham) thinking this is unexpected so when I won, it was just amazing! I was really, really happy and really surprised.
​
I hadn't prepared a speech or anything, but luckily I can do talking, so we went all the way across the room and up on the stage. What I didn't realise, because we didn't think we'd win, is that Lee had already had quite a bit of free wine. He followed me on stage and was behind me as I was doing my thank you speech and I said, “Well, really, this needs to go to Lee as well” and everyone kind of went panto style, “He's behind you!.” He's videoing the whole thing except for he was just that little bit too drunk. So not only did he fail to video it, but he also tripped over the drum riser! It just turned into this absolute farce, chaos on stage, which is kind of typically us in a funny way and my phone failed the next day and I lost all the footage.
Q: No! No way to recover it from your phone?
DB: No, I tried. I sent it to various people. No, it was a complete systems failure. Everything gone. It's typical, you know, these things happen but I have my award. Funnily enough, one of the songs on the Blues album has been nominated for an award in Nashville and we're in the final. Though, again, I don't expect to win. I never expect to win anything.
Q: Are you going to Nashville?
DB: Oh, I doubt it very much. Like I say, we're not going to win. Most of them are American and the song they've picked is “Slow Wi-Fi Weekend,” which is, you know, typical me kind of tongue in cheek first world problems kind of song.
Q: You know, as well as the songs that you write, I really like your actual writing. You wrote I read the piece on your website titled Why You Really Matter and I was wondering how you feel about the old school music business compared to what it is now.
DB: It's actually really pointless in life to hark back nostalgically, because the thing is, you can't change the present. It’s why I do a lot with AI for example. I experiment a lot because it's here. I know a lot of artists who are kind of trying to turn back the clock but you can't. All you do is you drive things underground and I think the best thing to do is actually to be open about what you do with AI, to say I am using AI because if people keep vilifying you for doing it, then you just go underground and the thing is, it's getting better all the time but there's going to come a point very soon, where you're simply not going to be able to tell the difference what's real and what isn't. We are moving to this space so I think the best thing you can do is to familiarise yourself with the modern world and where it's going as much as you can.
I am so privileged that I've been able to have a career that spans so much technological change. When I started, it was all live. I remember having a Fostex 8-track in my bedroom and using it very, very badly but having to do everything live and there weren't many effects and everything was ultra real. You really had to be able to do stuff live in order to get away with anything. No autotunes, anything like that. Touring without anyone having a mobile phone, let alone a portable video camera, all these things. In a way, it would have been nice to have more footage of the Violet Hour tour and touring with various bands in the 90s and all that kind of thing but by the same token, people went out. People went out because you didn't have Netflix on their phone and because things were more affordable and because in order to have a social life, you had to go out. I think in some ways it was probably healthier but then again, it's really easy to say in our day, everything was better. I think it's just different and as I keep saying, we're only one solar flare away from us all playing around the campfire again.
The worst thing for me is that fewer and fewer people are going out to gigs, which is why we're doing a lot of acoustic gigs because band gigs are expensive. They're all session players; It costs money. Going to gigs is an older person's thing to do now. You know, most people who go to gigs are vintage, like myself and yourself. You go to rock festivals every year there's more walking sticks and everyone's got their folded chairs that they bring. Nobody sits in the grass anymore because it's kind of hard work getting up again. (laughs) Unfortunately, we are mortal. Audiences are shrinking and shrinking, making it really hard for festival organisers, making it really hard for bands. People who used to play to 20,000 people are now playing to 1,000 people.
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That is a real shame, because obviously I know my days are numbered too. I can see my audience waning along with myself. It’s sad because it's a sign of mortality and nobody wants to see that.
Q: I don't know if it's a sign of mortality Doris. I think it's more of a sign of changing music fashions.
DB: I think it's more than that. I think part of the reason that the older people aren't going out so much is because of health. The amount of people that write to me on my mailing list saying “I'd love to come, but I've now got cancer, or my wife's got cancer, or I live in New York.”
Q: Yeah, I'd agree with that. You've been in this business a long time. Back in the 70s, I think there were probably only three women in Prog Rock at the most. I'm thinking of Sonia Christina, and I can't think of any others offhand but there probably was. It's changed a lot now. You go to festivals now, prog festivals or whatever, there's huge amounts of women in there. What's been the big changes you've noticed in your tenure, from when you started to now, of the approach towards women in Prog and Rock and music in general?
DB: Do you know what? I'm one of those kinds of confident, bold people who's never really suffered a lot from sexism or whatever. I think people just go for easier pickings than me because I'm quite outspoken and I will totally slam somebody down if they talk to me in a way that I don't like so it's not actually been very necessary. I've worked mostly with blokes and I've never really had those kinds of problems. I've always been slightly oblivious to things, but I've never really considered myself as a Prog singer. It's just that I got lumped in there. It's accidental because I like loads of different types of music. Initially with Violet Hour, that was kind of a Prog band, but at the time it was called Dream Prog or Neo Prog and it was kind of lumped in with All About Eve and things like that. It wasn't Genesis or Marillion or those kinds of bands, but it was loosely Prog, slightly more commercial Prog maybe.
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I think I've been more of a Rock and Blues singer, but musically we've always tried to make things a little bit more interesting. The way me and Lee work, we just mash loads of genres together because we like lots of different types of music. It's totally left field and because it's fun, because we enjoy it. People have always really struggled putting us in a genre anyway so I'm really grateful that the Progressive umbrella have taken us under their wing because we don't fit comfortably anywhere else.
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If you think about female prog singers, you tend to think about quite ethereal voices. It's a lot of clean, almost sort of Irish folk type voices. I'm not. I've got this rough, big Blues voice, which doesn't fit with Prog traditionally at all. I think possibly if I'd stuck to a genre and just kind of gone with a niche, I'd be much, much more well-known than I am. We've really been our own worst enemy in the kind of stuff that we produce, to be a little bit different.
Q: What do you listen to at home?
DB: I don't know, Peter and the Wolf and some of my dad's CDs and The Police and James Brown and loads and loads of different stuff. I love Led Zeppelin. I love Pink Floyd. I love things that you would expect me to love. I love news, I love radio and podcasts.
Q: Doris, thank you so much for doing this.
DB: Thank you!
JOE PARRISH
Q: A New Day was the first time for me to see you, first time I'd actually heard of you, to be fair, and I was really, really impressed with your set.
JP: Oh, thanks very much. Yeah, we enjoyed it.
Q: What I particularly found really good was that I've seen a lot of Folk Metal bands but they always seem to focus more on the Metal than Folk. You have a really, really nice balance between the two genres.
JP: Yeah, thanks, that was our aim really; I know exactly what you mean. It's more sort of Metal riffs with various faux, Folky bits added. I consider us a folk band just with distortion. It's hard to summarize exactly what you do in just a few pithy kind of words, but I think that's as close as we can get.
Q: So was that your credo when you set out to do this band?
JP: When we first formed the band, which was me and Jack (Clark), the other guitarist, it was very much the Folk thing and wanting to create a band that was in the vein of those guys from the 70s, like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention and all that kind of stuff but also that just went even further back to the authentic Folk music itself because a lot of the modern Folk Metal bands, they're not actually that well versed in genuine traditional Folk music - it's more like Fantasy Metal or something like that. I've always loved Folk music, always loved traditional Celtic music and English folk music. So, yeah, we just wanted to present that in a more modern kind of medium with electric guitars.
Q: You do it very well. Another thing as well is on something like “Pagan Spirit” you're all obviously very versed on your instruments but you don't go for the over-the-top Metal solos. You actually give very nicely constructed solos within the melody.
JP: Yeah, and that song is a good example of that. The solos in that are just more melodies, really because usually, when I write a song, I've got more than one idea for what I want the melody of a section to be so, if there is room for a solo in the song, I usually just take it as an opportunity to get more of the melodies that I was happy with, that I didn't use. I think we all had - especially guitar players - we all had our phase when we were like 14 or 15, where we were into Dream Theater and play a million notes a second and stuff like that. When I actually sit and try and come up with a solo, if I do something fast, it's so rare that I actually think it sounds good or that I think it sounds better than just a powerful melodic phrase. I mean, it's not like never playing fast is good, but you can still play fast and it be melodic, especially within the Celtic sound. A lot of players, not just of guitar, but of Celtic whistles and pipes and various other instruments, they quite often do a really rapid flurry of notes, but it sounds characterful.
Q: At the New Day Festival as well, you did a seven minutes Black Sabbath tribute. Did you actually put that together specifically for that show?
JP: Yeah. We actually had, we had a gig the week Ozzy died. I think, I feel like he died on the Tuesday of that week, maybe the Wednesday, and we had a gig on the Saturday so I was debating putting something together because we do all love Sabbath and then I thought, oh, well, there isn't really time but then Jack texted me and he was like, “Dude, I think we should do a Sabbath thing on Saturday.” So with the encouragement of another band member, I limited myself to just putting it together in an hour and recording a really rough demo because there's so many riffs that I could have put in there…
Q: I was going to ask, how did you come up with the final, what was it, five or six pieces?
JP: I knew I didn't want to put in all the really classic ones. I didn't want “Iron Man” in there and stuff like that, because it's super overplayed but all the great Sabbath riffs, every guitar player knows them. I just stuck in there and tried to do it quickly and intuitively and not over analyse it, all that kind of thing. Then, once I added the flute doing Ozzy's vocal parts, it just sounded like a darker, heavier Jethro Tull.
Q: That’s exactly what sprung to mind, that this was a dark Jethro Tull and it worked really, really well.
JP: Thanks. We didn't really have to do a lot to it because the riffs are so iconic. They're so simple as well, in a good way but it's kind of like, if we're all just doubling up, playing the riffs and me doing a few of the vocal melodies on the flute, you don't really need to do a lot to it for it to sound good.
Q: Now, I think you've just got the one album and an EP out, is that correct?
JP: Yeah, and a bunch of singles and stuff.
Q: The album, Lakesongs of Elbid, is a marvellous collection of songs. How long did it take you to put that album together and record it? It's beautifully produced, by the way.
JP: Oh, thank you, yeah we put a lot of time into that. From 2020 to 2024, I was the live band guitarist for Jethro Tull, so I was touring a lot with Ian and the guys so it was basically whenever we were at home and I had some spare time, trying to put these songs together and record them. It wasn’t in the traditional way you do an album, where you record everything and then mix everything. It was more, write a song, record it, get it mixed, and that song is done. It’s not ideal, but it's the only way we could really do it, with me being away a lot of the time. In answer to your question, I'd say probably all in all, it took more than two years to accumulate all the best songs and then go, “Oh, I think we've got an album now.”
Q: That is a long time in the making. How's the next one coming along?
JP: Very well, actually. Part of the reason I left Tull in last year was so I could have a bit more time to do the next Albion album. Actually, Jack, took up the mantle with Tull and he's now touring with them but it's not quite as busy as it was when I was in the band, so he can still play with us and it's not too much of a scheduling conflict. The new album, last week I sent off everything, all the files and all the projects to the studio where we get all our stuff mixed in Sweden so my job for now is done and they're currently getting everything to a good place and then they'll send me everything back so I can give them my notes. I would have liked to get it out this year, but it's a bit of a stretch now.
I thought it always looks nice when a band has an album a year. Not that it matters too much. Actually, it's kind of turned into two albums because we had so much material and I don't really want to release it as a double album because I feel it's just too much for people to digest in one go so we'll probably release it as two separate albums, five or six months apart.
Q: Sounds like a good idea to me.
JP: Yeah, something like that. I would guess the first one will probably be late winter, early spring next year and then the second one probably around this time next year.
Q: All right. Joe, thanks very much for doing this. Much appreciated.
JP: No worries Glenn. Good talking to you.
COLIN FELL and JOHN SAMUELL
Q: A New Day. I believe this was your ninth year…
C & J: Yes, yeah.
Q: Over the nine years, how has it changed, if at all?
JS: I'd say very little.
CF: Yeah, it's always been the same set-up which you saw this year. So, there's the two stages. Almost everybody has a seat at the main stage to set up for when there's bands on that they're not that interested in and then the second stage is in the sunken garden bit. The only main difference is there used to be two bars. There was a bar in the corner where the cheese stall was this time, just as you went out the gate into the main field from the second stage. After that, very little.
JS: One or two changes in the areas that we pitch in and that, but as regards to music, the festival itself, it's the beer tent, the main beer tent has always been the one situated where it was. Food layout's the same and it's been the same format, hasn't it?
CF: Yeah, completely.
Q: How about attendance? Has the attendance grown, reduced, stayed the same?
JS: I don't know, it seems pretty consistent. It fluctuates a bit some days, you know, Friday is quieter. Saturday definitely is, I suppose, the busiest. I did notice in the earlier years, sometimes there were families there. But I haven't noticed so many children recent years.
CF: Some of them grown up!
JS: Well, yeah.
Q: 2016 was your first year, is that right?
CF: Yeah, that's right.
Q: They do have a marvellous selection, a very eclectic selection of bands on.
JS: Oh, definitely!
CF: I mean, the first year was classic, really. It had Wilko, Johnson, Stray and The Stranglers all headlining, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I mean, you don't get much better than that, really.
Q: This is obviously now an annual event for you because when we were sitting there talking, you had already checked next year's line-up so you obviously plan on this every year. What kind of preparations do you make and how far in advance?
JS: There have been one or two years where we bought the ticket at the festival for the following year so can't get much more advanced than that. Other than that, we tend to, we might wait to see what the final line-up is or, to be honest with you, we like the event as much so we're pretty much hooked on going in for next year anyway. We might leave it till sort of later in the year, but then we just have to see. Just send off for the tickets and Bob's your uncle.
Q: You camp?
CF: Yeah, we've done that every year.
Q: But you're quite local.
JS: We are local, but it would cost a little bit in cabs, etc and there's just the convenience of it.
CF: Just go back to the caravan and we can have a beer afterwards and a chill.
Q: So you're in a caravan?
JS: Oh, yes, creature comforts, yeah.
Q: So you can rent a caravan on site?
JS: No. There are some glamping facilities, that Mount Ephriam have recently set up, but I dare say you'd have to book those pretty early. I don't think that's anything done via A New Day. I don't think A New Day lay on anything glamping-wise. They lay on the areas, they lay on the generator for electricity, they lay on shower blocks and toilet blocks, but I don't think they go that bit farther and do the glamping or pre-erected tents.
Q: Over the years, what have been some of the great shows you've seen there?
CF: Oh, that's a tricky one.
JS: Uriah Heep was a really great...I can't remember what year that was…
CF: It was 2017.
JS: They topped out on the Saturday and that was awesome. Ten Years After…
CF: They were very good, yeah.
JS: Admittedly, it wasn't with Alvin Lee…
CF: Marcus Bonfanti. Awesome guitar player. I've always enjoyed Focus and Ian Anderson as well and I enjoyed the Blockheads. Then you've got Slade and Sweet that just, are just such fun bands. It doesn't matter it's the middle of summer and you're singing Christmas songs. Glenn Hughes was good as well.
CF: Oh, yeah, ex-Deep Purple..I was very impressed with him!
Q: What bands would you like to see there? Obviously, you're not going to get Lady Gaga or anybody of that size but is there anybody that you'd like to see there?
JS: Oh, that's a good question. Takes a bit of thinking…I'm not, probably, I'm not the best one to ask regarding the newer ones…
CF: New ones for me would be Royal Blood.
Q: What kind of stuff is that?
CF: Rock. The album's called Royal Blood as well. Look that up.
JS: Have you heard of Cats in Space?
Q: Yeah. Cats in Space would be a good one to close out on a Friday or a Saturday.
CF: Definitely Cats in Space.
JS: The Answer, Ash…both of those would be good.
CF: Blues Pills
JS: Blues Pills! Swedish band. Awesome lady vocalist; Fills all your dreams, I tell you.
Q: I’ll throw in Bobbie Dazzle and The Crystal Teardrop. Check both of those out. Frank was telling me they get something like 300 submissions every year…
CF: Wow.
Q: …and of course, they've already booked, half the acts. There's only really kind of 10 or 15 slots left by the time they get the submissions and they have to weed through them all. You know, which sounds like a perfect job for me, to be honest.
JS: It does, isn't it? Another one that comes to mind is the Von Hertzen Brothers from Finland. Check them out.
Q: Okay. So, have you seen all of these around where you live?
CF: Often, if we're honest, apart from New Day Festival and Margate, not a lot comes down to Canterbury. So we have to go to London if we want to see anybody of any note. With these sort of small festivals and things that we go to being the exception where you can get some really great bands.
Q: So for you two, you're concert veterans. How important is something like A New Day to you in your calendar?
CF: Oh, it's hugely important! It's the must-do of the year, I think, because it's such a small and neat festival. You know, you've experienced it. It's just a very nice place to be, particularly in the summer. Occasionally, we have had rain, but not very often. It's just a great place to be and spend a few hours drinking and listening to music on a weekend.
Q: How much are the tickets?
JS: I think it's something about 125 quid for the four days.
Q: That's ridiculously cheap.
JS: Well one of the organisers there, Dave Rees, he's always adamant about keeping the ticket price down. The last thing he wants to do is to put the price up.
Q: I get that and I understand it and it's a very honourable thing but, you know, I reckon if they put 10 quid on a ticket, nobody would bat an eyelid.
JS: Glenn, I'd pay another 40 quid. You consider, you know, I mean, as Colin says, you look at the place, the setting, the organisation and the way it all fits.
CF: I'd willingly do that to keep the event going. You know, if we were given the option and they said “Look, I'm sorry guys, we've either got to put the ticket price up or we can't do it.” Fine. Carry on!
JS: The only thing I would say is that I'm sure Dave's thinking, given the average age of some of his clientele, I think he probably thinks that not all of them might have the funds to be able to put it up too much and I suspect that's probably behind why he doesn't want to do that.
Q: Yeah and again, that's a very honourable thing to do.
Q: Look, let's face it, if Soft Machine played in your local pub, you'd pay 25 quid to go in…
CF: Yeah.
Q: …and if Hawkwind played in your local pub, you'd pay 25 quid to go in.
CF: I would, yeah.
Q: There you go. Gentlemen, thank you very much for doing this. Good to see you both.
C & J: Yeah, you too. Stay in touch and all the best.