The new album by The Tangent is out now!
It's a double CD set - 2 very different CDs both of which have one thing in common...
The Concept - Yes!, it's one of those!
An album based on - quite simply - the past 70 years. Music. Film. World Events. TV
So at the root... it's about US. Not "us" the band. All of us
Disc ONE - Songs and stories, The Tangent take their epic songwriting seriously and there are two 20 minute + songs here along with a short "intermission" song
Disc TWO - "La Suite que c'etait" - a multiple ensemble instrumental suite inspired by works such as "Five Bridges" "Concerto For Group & Orchestra" and their like
As people who actually know me know... I am a ferocious critic of my own work in matters of performance, composition, singing and production. There are some pieces I am proud of, some I am not and sadly, for me, the sum total of my efforts to create exactly what I want to create has failed to create ONE single album that I can sit back and think "We got that one spot on". And it's a curse.
Which brings me to our new album "Was". And in what represents a radical departure from the norm - I am going to cross a few red lines and give some opinions on it
1. I think this is the best album I have ever been involved with
2. The musicians who made this record with me were absolutely "on fire" for this recording and Luke Machin's production work has been incredibly revealing - giving us a huge but well defined soundstage, so... as a result....
3. I think that my desire to make something that is true, expansive long form Progressive Rock has finally been realised. I have personally waited for years to hear something else quite like this. The open mindedness of the musicians who created it have allowed us to make a record rooted in Prog sensibilities with 50 years of subsequent musical development baked in. If the past 50 years do not interest you, this is the wrong train. This is the 19.59 to Rightnow Picadilly (arr. 20.26). Calling at Prog Central, Disco Temple Meads, Hardrock Northgate, Jazz Fusion Parkway, EDM Westgate and Techno Waverley. Diversions are likely.
4. The album is a 2 cd set. But each of the 2 Cds is an album in itself. Each album seeks to chaotically catalogue the life of those of us on the cusp of the Boomer/Generation X faultline. One album does it with songs. The other with totally different Instrumentals. It's not in chronological order. For the first time ever, I can actually say "I Think It Worked"
5. I honestly think that - for some people - they have dreamed of an album like this. It's complex, content packed, is slow to reveal itself. It takes time to get it. It's a massive listen and if you have the "Almost Was" CD with the main one, the total music time is well over the two hour mark. The instrumental album is inspired by the hybrids like Lord's "Concerto For Group & Orchestra", Emersons "Five Bridges Suite", Zappa's "Grand Wazoo" and "Ommadawn" without sounding like any of them.
6, It's nostalgic, yet realistic. The people this record is aimed at will recognise so much from their own lives in the music and lyics. It's chock full of references. But we really worked hard to make it stand as an album that sounds like us.
7. It took three years to conceive, write, record and produce through unrelated difficult times for a few of us. We lost a long time member, but added another two people to the group. In the case of the bass player we decided to let this album be John's debut with the band and not Jonas' swansong and therefore we painstakingly went back and re-organised it to reflect John's contribution to CD one - leaving me on bass for CD 2. Sadly as Rob Groucutt arrived later in the game we didn't have time to add him, and his debut with the Tangent recorded output will be on T15.
8. This has been the most complex and ambitious album we have made by a country mile. The work that has gone into it is huge. We feel, I feel that many bands have a peak. A peak that often comes within the first handful of albums they make - and there are those who think that we peaked on our debut. That I can accept, and understand. But for me.. this is a peak. it's a career best for me, I'm hopeful that some of you will come to share this view. But as always.. it's up to you.
9. It really IS up to you. This album will not be played on a mainstream radio station ever. It will never be mentioned in the national daily newspapers. For those of you who have an interest in contemporary Progressive Rock but feel that "the old stuff will always be best" - well, you could just miss this record. You thought you'd never hear anything on a scale like Tales, Lamb, Wall again. Well you can. You'll need to put as much time and effort into this as you did many years ago for those fantastic records. But if you want real, no holds barred, involving, long form, complex and unfolding listening experiences, we've just made one for you. In fact.. especially for you.
We could do the usual. We could blag on about being "critically acclaimed" we could bullshit about sales figures, we could try to explain "Was" in quick advertising language. No point. You're either here, or you're not. And as you ARE - well what follows is not bkurb written for publicity. It's the actual text on which the album is based. It was written in 2024
I always felt part of a generation lost in time. It's my guess that there are many others of around my age who feel the same. For those of us born in the late 50s and early 60's there was this artificial tectonic plate or cusp that seemed to happen as we lived through the important years of our late teens and early 20s. A watershed that determined which side of fashionable we were on, and gave us a "choice" of which side to be on. And that was only half the problem. As children of the TV age we were regaled constantly with cheap to broadcast old movies like "Passport To Pimlico", "I'm Alright Jack", and many 30s-40s- 50s movies that showed us a world in which we no longer lived.. and indeed never had lived. The cinema was drawing in blockbuster audiences for films about the war, the technicolour festivals of Where Eagles Go to Telemark and Escape with Pelé to Navarone. And while James Bond at least had the decency to wend his way through the upper echelons of contemporaneous time frame he was currently in, the military training and steadfast traditional Churchillian values were always there as reminders of "how we won" the war.
There is little doubt in my mind that never in the field of human conflict have the horrors of war provided so much entertainment to so many. Often forgotten is the fact that even two of the most successful musicals of all time, "The Sound Of Music" and "South Pacific" were both set in wartime with those wars playing a role crucial to the stories being told. Happy Talk indeed!
And I loved them all. By age 15 I could have happily demanded to see your papers in a Hollywood German accent, had you thrown into the cooler and then switched roles to provide a cheeky cockney remark leaving some Oberleutenant looking confused and spitting rage. And as these fims began to gently age, the celluloid yellowing a little, the colours fading and darkening and the next wave of altogether more "realistic" war films like "Private Ryan" and "Schindlers List" began to appear, perhaps it was inevitable that we would become nostalgic for the more heroic portrayals we had grown up with.
But, I'd hazard a fairly safe bet, that no-one holding this album and reading these notes was ever THERE. Nowadays, even our parents only have/had the dimmest of memories of wartime as young children, and their stories were of evacuation, not combat. Their children, i.e US in the United Kingdom would never be conscripted to fight in a war and unless things are really desperate, never will be. In some typically British ways, we were often reminded of this with that "you don't know you were born" scorn as if we'd somehow managed to deftly and deliberately skive off the privelege of dying for no reason on behalf of someone who wouldn't have the faintest idea who you were.
All of which made us a fairly uninteresting bunch it seems. The people who they call "Boomers" were doing Kindergarten paintings while the hippies were on the rise in Francisco. They were aged between 6 and 15 during the Apollo programme and safely tucked up in bed as their parents worriedly watched the flickering reports of The Cuban Missile Crisis on late night news. Always knew there must be some reason the TV went stright off after "Magic Roundabout". And by the time we'd reached 17 years old (in my case) the hippy thing was over, the UK was in another of its suicide pacts, had devalued the pound and everyone was on strike. A lot of us had enjoyed the promise of this amazing "Prog Rock" stuff and found its uplifting message a bit of a tonic against the gloom that surrounded us, there were power cuts, Waste disposal strikes and at this point the BBC decided to tip Prog Rock into a dustbin we didn't even know we were paying for and replace it with Punk and Disco - revered to this very day in serious arts programmes, where the grudging acceptance that Prog Rock ever existed at all is usually recounted on a show presented by a comedian.
In 2023/24/25... during the making of this album I was personally experiencing my 66th year of having lived a life untouched directly by war. I lived as one of the first generation of people in Britain for centuries who could make this claim. I am, to this day intensely grateful for this and consider myself incredibly lucky.
Yet, like many people in the UK, I grew up in a world of nostalgia for something I never saw. TV series like Colditz, even sitcoms like Dad's Army, It ain't Half Hot mum, 'Allo 'allo along with the oft repeated movies like 633 squadron, Eagle has Landed, Dambusters, Reach For The Sky, Cruel Sea - PLUS the comic book continuations of these stories in series like The Victor, Commando books, bestsellers by Herman Hesse and so on and so on. By the age of 21, the average punter like me knew all about the Gestapo, the SS, the Fleet Air Arm, Bomber Command, Chain Home, Window, Big Wings despite most of these things having become defunct 15 years before we were born. I have known that Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring was (among other things) head of the Luftwaffe since I was 14. During the making of this album I had to Google who was the UK Prime Minister at the time of my birth. I'd expected the answer Macmillan and I was indeed right, but I'd had to "phone a friend" to be sure. I'd have answered the question of "who was in charge of Bomber Command in WW2" instantly before the choices came on screen.
Andy in MacDonalds Den Haag 1979 the day Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK
The UK, (where the US had shows like Starsky And Hutch, Kojak and Columbo having gone "all in" on "Cops" instead of soldiers to carry the torch of moral value), had gone instead for stuff like "The Sweeney" - gritty crime drama where the cops were as horrible (if not more so) than the crooks. Where Starsk and Hutch basked in the sunshine of California, The Sweeney operated under leaden skies in a crumbling vision of very urban Britain. You needed to watch light hearted shows like "Summer Wine" or "All Creatures" if you wanted the Sun to shine, to see a tree, a field or the astonishing green of England. Then followed more light hearted stuff NOT set in green pastures, so even the laughs of "Fools and Horses" (and there were many laughs) "Minder", "Porridge" were set in ... er some godawful part of our capital city and in the latter case a prison, and their heores were of a more "dodgy" nature. Our soap operas too were thousands of miles from the sunlit wealth pools of Dallas and Dynasty, set in hard faced grim inner city areas of Manchester and London, with one daring to be on a Yorkshire Farm. And it was going broke. All the time. It seemed that we had so little to be proud of since the last fighters of WW2 returned to base.
Yet, after the the Beatles, Yes, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Emerson Lake & Palmer and King Crimson had quiety gone out and conquered the world with long lasting fanbases in South and North America, Europe and even Eastern Europe under Communist rule. They had done this with very very little co-operation from any of Britain's state owned broadcasting monopoly (as it was then) the BBC who had moved any bands like this to one 3 hour long show on a Saturday afternoon, and a late night show where the presenter was more of a harsh critic than a fan. After the arrival of Punk Rock he never played prog again. Similarly after this point the New Musical Express dropped Prog like a rotten apple, and the other papers either followed suit or went bust. Progressive Rock music lay dormant. It would return.
It's often as though nothing our generation ever did is worth mentioning. Our portrayal in media has been.. scant to say the least. back in the 70s "cops" who are currently now in their 80s or 90s were arresting, chasing, criminals who are also now in their 70s or 80s. Does anyone reading this remember someone of their own age then being any part of The Sweeney? or, for that matter lets jump forward in time to "The Bill" by which time people of MY age were already sufficiently advanced up the ladder to be boring beaurocrats spoiling the fun of the youger cops. We've been portrayed as pesky restrictive Dads in the 90s and it's gone as far as making just about every Pedophile ever portrayed on TV is someone from the "Boomer" generation. Corrupt politicians, tick.... Headmasters, tick, Country Vets (The older ones) tick.... and of course on "Question Time" we are selected as the lifeblood of Reform and Brexit, and Trumpism in the USA despite many of us being totally horrified by such unfair politics.
And suddenly, there it is. 66 years into a life that has always seemed built on rose tinted views of an unvisited past - here we are, thrust onto the same page, the same hour, minute and year as, all over the world, political menu du jour starts to look an awful awful lot like the system that the heroes of those blood and thunder epics of yore were fighting. To quote the definition provided by Merriam Webster, the leading dictionary of the English language in the USA since 1828, "Fascism" is " : a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition"
I have seen many people (including Musk with his "Yawn" emoticon) scoff at the accusations of fascism being levelled at, for example, the Trump Administration. But the word means what it means, the meaning of the word doesn't change to not include that administration. An administration that chooses two strap lines to declare its intent.. those being "America First" and "Make America Great Again" has 100 percent ticked the boxes to comply with the first few words of the USA written definition a "regime (such as the fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual" And if you are one who scoffs, and feels that being a called a Fascist is insulting, take a look at the definition of the word. I'm sorry but that word means what it means. If you support the Trump Administrations policies you DO support the exaltation of Nation. You DO have a dictatorial leader and he has vowed, promised to do many things that are in themselves textbook definitions of "Severe economic and social regimentation". Sorry, but willy nilly Tariffs that say simple "Do as we say or else" and "We will only recognise 2 genders", and "we will remove from their position anyone who opposes us in the running of the state", "drain the swamp", "lock her up". If you agree with, support all these things, you are a supporter of fascism. And the noun for that person is a "Fascist". it's time for you to declare or at least admit and accept who and what you are. And I disagree with you. And so did every goddamn RAF pilot, US Marine, French Resistance operative, Australian Anzac, Polish recruit, Gurka in the movies. They were all out there fighting the Fascism of the time. They weren't fighting "Germany" or "Japan". They were fighting fascism. Even the most jingoistic of the classic war yarns had this heart always there and often on their sleeves.
I suppose that Trump could rail against the definition. Have it changed. After all he's managed to change the definition of "Criminal", "Rapist", "Insurrectionist" in so many minds, surely a Dictionary definition should be easy to change with a threat of tariffs, and an education department book ban. He'd be playing stright into my court of course, but he'd have rid of me in a puff of low humour. (Failed musician... can't work out if it's a man) Then move onto how he would like to forcibly remove more than 2,000,000 people from their own lands in order to build a resort. I don't know where he's planning on sending them, but I suppose he could concentrate them somewhere while he sorts that out.
And this is where we are. Not singing about it, watching films about it, not fantasising, forecasting, speculating. The Boomers are seeing and beginning to live through what they have been warned about by Hollywood, Ealing Studios, by the Beat Poets, The Hippies, Beatniks, Punks, Star Trek and Star Wars actually once again taking control of the world. That movement is rising in South America, Europe, the Far East and here in Britain is vaunted heavily by the people who are so keen to point out on remembrnace day, the sacrifices made by our boys in the wars of the 20th. Sacrifices made, ultimately to defeat the ideologies they now support.
So.. as one of the last surviving human beings who still believes in the true Rock and Roll music, the words of Dylan and Mitchell, Hammill, Gaye, and Anderson, Wonder, Waters, Hendrix, Tennant, Bragg, Nobacon have guided me through my life and been right there at every corner I have turned, all I can do is ask you..
Let me sing, lets be done with all the interfaces. The Medieval keyboard that connects me to the strings. It's just buttons that I'm Pressing in an effort to communicate with you!. let's just TALK, leave the emoticons behind us - a passing phase of which we'll laugh one day to come. I'll leave you more than dreams if you'll reciprocate, if you'll communicate with me. If I can't find something to say, well the world will go on anyway. That's how it is! Let's just be US, let's take some time together because Planet Earth isn't giving all that much. We've got four score years, all the problems, all the tears to cry... so let's skip the millions of worthless opinions, the rankings, the thumbs up, the political minions all waiting to get you on their side. And for that they need a really big divide. Don't let them have it.
