Hi, Andy Tillison here to tell you about our new album "Auto Reconnaissance."
I have always TRIED to work on the basis that a band does not always have to be a series of releases one after the other. And of course that is somehow inevitable, but it's not always necessary to see it that way. You can see a band as a "piece of art" as a whole. One that took many years to finish perhaps, one where at certain stages in the procedure the work might have sounded incomplete.
I think I've been approaching this whole band since 2002 as more of a TV serial type of affair - telling many stories with a uniting over-arching theme. This, as opposed to a series of stand alone movies or one offs. I think the right word must be "Episodic"
One thing I've often done though is to bring everything around to a kind of "Familar Territory" so that temporary "endings" are almost evident in the pieces. So that, if there's some kind of sequence of episodes in say "Star Trek" that focus on some expedition on a planet, or on the adventures of one member of the cast, it is not long before we get an episode where we are in the familar surroundings of the Bridge of The Enterprise, or in The Engine Room.. and the audience can feel they have made a journey and now returned home.
With Auto Reconnaissance, I feel we have an episode of The Tangent where Kirk is on the bridge with Spock looking into his screen, Uhura has that thing in her ear, Chekov and Sulu are driving and Scotty is moaning that he needs moorr poooerr. Something unexpected has turned up and Kirk wants it on the screen. And from that familiar vantage point we know we can take off anywhere where the writers want to go.
There have been Tangent albums that do this before. In my eyes, there were "Down & Out" and "A Spark In The Aether" where we kind of re-set the scene and were then able to branch off from it. Like "Star Trek" there's a kind of Canon approach in The Tangent in that we've often revisted themes, followed stories up (because they are not finished yet) and had the re-appearance of several characters in subsequent songs. There is an article about our sequels and how they relate to the originals HERE.
So, I wanted to put all our fave characters on the bridge to start this album. That's not just Luke, Jonas, Steve, Theo and Myself, but the whole "What The Tangent Do" thing. So we had something "on screen" in the Enterprise bridge and we just had to deal with it. A good start to any episode. So we kicked off with a tuneful, upbeat prog and roll track called "Life On Hold" and it gives all the musicians a chance to shine and we hope it gives the audience chance to tap feet, drive too fast, sing along and annoy teenagers and all the lovely things that progressive music can do for us. Life on Hold is a song about self education, the fine art of teaching ones self loads of stuff- by reading, browsing, watching and inputting data to our heads... a lot of which will not save us from jeapoardy, but is often very pleasurable to know. (Like which order the Van Der Graaf albums were recorded in or the wheel arrangements of British Steam Locomotives, Doctor Who actors in order, etc etc). This song fits into the Tangent Mould from which we made "Uphill From Here", "Spark In The Aether" and "A Crisis In Midlife".
Next up is "Jinxed In Jersey". This is also familiar territory. It's an account of a journey on foot through a large city and ther various places I passed through and the characters I met on that journey. Like its predecessors, various landmarks are named and checked off the "list" in much the same way as The Albert Hall, The Eiffel Tower and Brent Cross Shpping Centre were mentioned in earlier pieces. This is a pretty long song at over 15 minutes and incorporates many Tangent tricks of the Trade, it's just that we have more tricks than we used to, so although there is a certain "Canterbury" style about it, there are sections where things we learned how to do on "The Adulthood Lie" just on the last album come into play, so there's this slightly odd mix of 70s UK Jazz fusion and Electro Drum & Bass. It's the first multi-sectioned piece on the album and has some astonishing playing from everyone - and I think Luke scrapes the laurels here.
"Under Your Spell" is next. There is precedent for love songs in The Tangent, but the last notable one was the multi-sectioned epic "The Full Gamut" which was the no holds barred story of a relationship breakup. I wanted to write something way way different from that, something that was romantic, mature (pointless a 61 year old singing about a stolen kiss behind the school bike shed unless dodgy nostalgia is really your thing) and... well actually, just really nice. I wanted it to sound a little like a cross between "I'm Not In Love" by 10cc, (one of our former members Paul Burgess actually played the Fender Rhodes piano part on that very recording) and "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" by Rose Royce, a song I loved at school having detected a synthesiser in it (and an early electro drum). Luke wanted us to bring that package a bit more up to date and with the use of more modern AND retro electro drum sounds we got the result we did. Theo takes the honours here with a glorious romantic Tenor solo at the end. As such we have by now set the stage for the episode in the first two tracks and are now into the meat of this episode. And we are slightly off track....
"The Tower Of Babel" is also a less obvious choice for a band normally seen as "Prog". It's a pop song, quite jazzy and certainly more than a little influenced by Steely Dan. Short and sweet it will only take 4 minutes of your life away. It's about modern burocracy and the gradual erosion of identity and personality by electronic form filling, box ticking and unmanned baggage check in frustration. "They want you to tick the box so that you can think outside it" is one of the lines in it, the notion being that you have to tick the boxes to qualify for the job, in which they purport to want you to ignore the box. Machines that answer phones, robot help boxes, push advice is a nightmare for many of us who remember being able to walk into a shop and say "My Mum asked if she could have some bacon, she'll pay you on Saturday" and walk home a minute later WITH the bacon. There's a nice little synth solo in this that I'm quite fond of.
And now we move to "Lie Back And Think of England". There's little doubt that this is being served up as a main plot line as it is the longest song we've ever released on Insideout - clocking in at just under half an hour. It has a similar role to "Where Are They Now?" from our "Down and Out" album, in that it is a spiritual sequel to several of our earlier songs all at once. First and foremost it's our second song that concerns "Brexit", and as such it is related to the first one "A Few Steps Down The Wrong Road". It is however, completely different in style, tone and message in almost every way conceivable. Rather than address the issue of Brexit directly in any way, the song is a sad look at the way our nation divided itself into camps and started shouting playground taunts at one another, be those taunts "Remoaner", "Brextremist", "Snowflake", "Fascist" or just making undeserved comments about peoples' intelligence levels... i.e. just about as low as we could get. If the military tactics for the Iraq War wer "Shock And Awe" then surely for the Brexit debate the tactics were more like "Cut And Paste". The line from our earlier song "The Wiki Man" - "Your matter of opinion is the main point of the show in these strange days" seemed to be more than vindicated in the years surrounding the referendum, and as such a fair chunk of this song continues the themes of that song from "COMM". "Lie Back" is at its heart a plea, a possibly naive plea, for forgiveness (a major theme in "Where Are They Now too) from both sides of the debate, and a realisation that neither side of the argument had the final say to what Britain was in relation to Europe. Because the rocks, stones, hills and Dales are this island. What we choose to do with them for a few years or even a few generations, is but one un-noticed second hand tick on the clock face of history. And somewhere in all of this, the character "Earnest" became involved again in my head. This man, his spitfire had become this icon for "Englishness", and I had to wonder if you'd played him a recording of the debates in 2019 whether he'd have had the same resolve when he took off all those years ago. This is the most challenging piece we ever took on, both lyrically and musically. The production of it was way beyond our capabilities just a few years ago, and even now for a band of our standing in the world with an annual budget less than the catering for a behind stage crew party at a Genesis gig - it was a tough one. The band, and I are supremely proud of this. Order Tissues. This one may get your emotions....
The album chooses to finish with the most uplifting of songs. A song that once apon a time in a galaxy far far away might have made the charts. A song of hope based around the Winter days that come every year, where the sun comes out and illuminates the world in the most exquisite light and shows you the colours of the world in all their magnificence. These days have the most positively inspiring effects on me, and I think that this song is the most cheerfully optimistic piece of music I have ever written. As the world needs a bit of hope at them moment, I hope that this song will, in particular, have an effect on all our listeners that is inwardly warming in a cold time.
This is our 11th album. But, as I said, you don't need to see it that way. You could call it The Tangent S01 E11. Episode 11 of the series. And, I very much hope, not the last. "Second Star to the Right and straight on until morning" as Kirk quoted from Peter Pan.