Since the magazine we write for has never featured an article about you, let's start with the beginning: how did it all happen?
Gregory: We - ehm it has been a long time ago - started working together about seven or eight years ago. Just me and Andy (Poole) and our first keyboard player, Ian Cooper. And we just got together and wrote some songs. After that we recorded some demo's, we played some gigs with Jadis and Galahad. The thing that really got the ball rolling for us, was getting involved with GEP. We had a bit of luck with meeting up with them. We were financing the recording of our album at the time and when they heard the demo tapes for Goodbye To The Age Of Steam they really liked what they heard and ehm last year we recorded and released our last album English Boy Wonders. Also managed to get Goodbye To The Age Of Steam released in Japan. Yeah, it's nice. Got an extra track on it.
We know since that was the review copy we got. But about that bonus track: it was played by Tony Mueller who didn't even play yet on that album? When was it recorded then?
Gregory: The song was an outtake of the English Boy Wonders. The English Boy Wonders album was over seventy minutes anyway and we two or three more songs that never made it onto the album and we used one of these for the Japanese release. I think EBW is long enough.
You just said you played with Jadis and Galahad. These bands are more of a rock band than you are. How did the audience react?
Gregory: That's a good question. We are a band that works on dynamics perhaps more than your average progressive band. We like the quieter moments, and build up to the larger moments. We hope that there's a difference between the two, instead of playing full-out all the time. In terms of response, people do not always get what we do. You saw it tonight. I think the audience thinned out instead of the other way around. We are doing something that we consider to be different from the normal progressive band. It is easy to say that we are genuinely trying to be progressive, but I think to some extent we are; we are trying to take the genre a little bit into a different direction. And we have some sort of jazz influence, some kind of Steely Dan influence that we are trying to get into the band.
What about The Blue Nile?
Gregory: Well, The Blue Nile is one of our favourite recording artists. Blue Nile, Radiohead, Counting Crows,..we got quite a number of nonprogressive influences. And the difficulty is to bring in these influences without alienating the audience we have, Sometimes it doesn't work that well. Your treading on a tightrope.
Is that an issue? Are you trying to please your fans?
Gregory: No, we are not trying to please them, but to ignore them might be a stupid thing to do. So while we are not trying to please them, on the other hand, we cannot forget that they are there. We write the music that we want to do and we are conscious that we are something slightly different. Not everybody approves of what we are doing not being in the general progressive style. Having said that. the new album that we've written and we will record next year, which will be called Bard, it was written with no audience in mind. It is basically 50 minutes of music all joined together very very traditional progressive I suppose. We just write what we like and we'll see where it takes us.
Although much of the recent music has become harder and louder it seems that you do not actually follow this trend and make rather quiet music, with only few outbursts.
Gregory: We tried to get some shorter songs on the album as well as some longer epic pieces. Well, like your magazine shows: Dream Theater on the front. Obviously that is a direction that progressive music is taking. Whilst we consider their technical abilities to be stunning, from our point of view we like to play a lot with chords. Our music is clever, but not showy. If you're a musician or a songwriter and you listen to our music, I think you would understand the subtleties. We are not following the road that many of the band are taking, following Dream Theater and so on. It is the heavier style that is more in vogue at the moment, yeah. Potentially it is a problem for us. I would say we are a very English band. For instance we have another strong influence which is XTC, which is also very English. And the grunge and Dream Theater influences coming from across the Atlantic are not the kind of thing we are interested in.
But what about bands that just become louder, not that they become prog metal or anything, but just louder since the audience now seems to be more open to it?
Gregory: Possibly yeah. I think if you listen to the classic progressive band like Genesis, you find that the quieter moments outweigh the louder moments. Again, we are using a low tech approach: a piano, the guitarsound I use is very basic, it is not high-tech. If you listen to the older progressive bands, that are the sounds that they are using. We are not going to follow that route, it not being within us to do that. Obviously we could try, but it wouldn't be genuine. Do you feel that it is a good thing that the bands and music are getting heavier?
Well, everybody should follow their hearts. The bands that turn out to be the most interesting are the ones that only play a certain style, but also breathe it. They are what they do.
Gregory: Tony is a not a progressive rock keyboard player. He is a pianist, a jazz pianist. Pete, our new drummer, has been with the band for a few weeks now. His influences are, well he did play in progressive bands before, very wide, again some kind of jazz influences. In the end you're right: we write the music we want to write and hope the audience appreciates it. And if they don't, it's tough.
About this quieter/louder parts. Personally, there could be more eruptions. I also like The Blue Nile, being rather quiet and relaxed, like Steely Dan for instance. So I guess you make a relaxed kind of progressive.
Gregory: To be honest, I think we are learning a lot about the material we have written. This is because we have started to gig again, We haven't done a gig, apart from some local gigs to warm up, since 1996 and the one before that was in 1994. So we have been playing together a bit more intensively the past few weeks we find out what is going to work live and what isn't. We are planning to do lots more gigs now. I think what we need to do is to see what we play live and include some of the heavier tracks. We need to think about the structure. Tonight I was standing the stage trying to listen like the audience would and I did hear a lot of quiet piano parts.
A lot of people were more impressed with the last and penultimate tracks.
Gregory: Yeah, Mr Boxgroveman and Albion Perfide. Well we got some more songs like that that we did not play, from the first album, Blue Silver Red, another long track and Blow The House Down, which we did play but as a piano ballad. I think we should have played it with the full length version with the big moments. So we've got the songs right there, we haven't got enough of them in the set yet. We are hoping to do some more gigs in Holland and in Germany in the next few months. We need to experiment and get some new stuf in there.
I saw that you Pete were playing from the sheets. Now you are new to the band so I can understand this, but the keyboard player also played from the sheets!
Pete: Well, I hate reading the music. I really hate it cause I love to interact with the musicians around me. The reason I'm reading is that the music is quite complex and I don't have it in my memory yet. As soon as I do have that those sheets are gone so I can turn to the guys and I can react to them. That is what music is all about. I do not know why Tony (Mueller) still does that. It's a different approach from a different musician.
You play so few gigs, I thought this might have been the reason that he still uses it.
Gregory: Basically, that was the reason, yeah. Our fault is that we continually write music, but we do not continually play it to an audience. Like I just said we have written a new album, but maybe we should have been gigging instead of writing. For none of the albums which we released we got out played to people. Tony is reading because until recently he hasn't played in the live environment.
Among the GEP bands you are probably the most unknown, aren't you?
Gregory: Yeah, I would say so. Different Trains is probably even more so.
But I guess they do not exist any more.
Gregory: Yeah I guess you are right. We are the least well-known band that still exists. I accept that.
Pete: That's a marvellous statement. Could you write that as headline please. Big Big Train: we are the least well-known band that still exists.
Gregory: We are hoping to do some support slots for IQ. They are doing the Subterranea show which they are finishing off I believe next year in April. They will record a video. After that it will be back to the normal show and then I hope they will put us on, cause yeah I think we need to sell some more CDs for the label. Although they are selling the CD. We went along Martin to pick up some CDs to sell at the gig and the only ones he had left were promo copies so we had to take those. GTTAOS had to get a new pressing.
Something else now. Where did you pick up this singer. Everybody thinks he's very English, but he is Canadian right?
Gregory: Yeah, he's Canadian. He left Canada because he thought the music scene in England was more interesting. He ended up with us, so probably it was a mistake, I don't know. At the time, Andy and I, we more or less started the band off and we realized we needed a singer. We had twenty or thirty people who were hopeless and Martin came along and he seemed to fill the bill and he fit right in. But he does seem English.
More English it seems than the rest of you.
Pete: My first impression was when hearing the CDs with the XTC influence and all, it seemed quintessentially English. I remember our first rehearsal and I heard this twang in his voice and I couldn't work out where he was coming from. I thought he was from Birmingham or something. He's got a great voice. Really one of the strong points of the band.
I am not sure about that. One of the things is that he sings with little power. He has a really quiet voice.
Gregory: Yes, he does sing quietely; he has a very melodic voice. I do think it suits the quieter moments more. At the moment I'm struggling away trying to learn backing vocals. Pete here is a good singer, so what we are going to try to do is to work on three voiced harmonies, So when we got those big moments, it could be the three of us there, hopefully in tune, hopefully at the same time, and hopefully not reading the words from a sheet of music. I think it is a fair point. Martin has a melodic voice and not the rough edge to it. It is a problem for us.
Pete: I feel it is a plus point. I mean it's not gravelly, it's not Rod Stewart. It's a pure tone coming out of his voice and it's really good, it's really good. And if we can get some three part stuff there, after I've learned the set a bit better so I can do some vocals, it could be very strong.
At least, it would be nice to have some more variation.
Gregory: As you might have noticed, GTTAOS does have a lot of backing vocals to give it that variety. On Bard the new album, it is a horrible thought, I will be singing some of the songs. And I like to have Pete have a go as well.
Who writes the lyrics?
Gregory: Me.
To me they also sound quite English.
Gregory: In what way?
Well not like Caravan you know, the quirky way, but more serious.
Gregory: Well, yes.
Pete: For me there is one word which describes the lyrics, which is melancholy. It doesn't mean that is desperately low or down all the time, but it makes you think a little bit. There's a lot of references to the past in it. Reminiscing.
Gregory: That's a very good point. Yes, we do have a slightly melancholy outlook in music and lyrics. Many of the bands here tonight -- I think the Tolkien stuff is almost gone by now -- are very earnest in what they write. They use quite colourful imagery. I think our lyrics are more down-to-earth, more about personal experiences, more than anything else. For instance, I have just been through a divorce, so English Boy Wonders and the next album are certainly a bit down. Bard is certainly more down than anything we have done.
The word we would use for the lyrics is "intimate".
Gregory: Yeah we are trying to create that...
Pete: I do not think it's necessarily bad or something.
You mean intimate or melancholy.
Pete: Whatever. I mean people that listen to the album might have had the same experiences.
Of course.
Gregory: You can compare our lyrics to for instance Family Life on the last Blue Nile album, which is a great album. I try also to evoke this in my lyrics.
We do feel that many progressive bands write about situations that occur, but hardly ever in a personal way. Distant.
Gregory: Well on EBW and absolutely on Bard the lyrics are personal and I do think one can feel this and appreciate it more deeply because of this.
Something else again: your longer songs really seem like stretched out short ones.
Gregory: I think it's a very good point. I listen to ourselves tonight, like I said and in fact I noticed that the longer songs are like this, they just happen to have a lot of music in them.
Pete: From the background that I come from, the songs of Big Big Train are immensely long. But then I heard the band before us and the band after us and now impression is, is that they are really short. Because they do one set of three songs. Slightly exaggerated maybe. Now I know that the music of Big Big Train differs from those, in that it has a beginning, a middle and an end and it goes somewhere.
Gregory: We are certainly not a fiddly band. Our earliest influence is Genesis I guess and they are not a fiddly band either. They are largely popular songs that became fairly epic and that is similar to what we have. We use the popular song format and just expand on it. This means also that there's a danger of us falling between two stores. I guess the typical progressive rock listener probably hasn't got that much time for us. And the average pop music listener probably thinks: "God, this goes on for a bit long". It's a tricky road that we are going there. I think bands like Radiohead are having a stab at that kind of thing. Differently of course, but still. There's definitely something going on, that the typical rock and pop bands are trying to stretch out.
Earlier on you told us that you did not play gigs often and now we get the impression that you feel this might have hampered your development as a band and songwriter.
Gregory: I'm learning a lot. It's okay to sit at home with your guitar or piano and write song and record a demo of it. When you do get out, it does teach you a lot about a song and I guess it has held us back a little. Not so much in the songwriting, but in terms of the band and its longevity, We are like any other band in the genre: we make an album and we hope to make another one. We are never certain that we are going to, This is why I'm anxious to create this longevity and that is why we have to do more shows. I think Pete's experience with other bands will help us to get more gigs, being more pushy about ourselves.
Pete: For me gigging is everything to me. I come from a gigging background and three, four, five nights a week is the norm for me. When I met these guys they were together for so long and they had played only five or so gigs. But that is where you hone your craft. Live. One gig is worth twenty rehearsals. It really is. Every little mistake means so much, that you will make it only once.We played here today and we made a few mistakes, but they are gone. They do not matter anymore. But next time you will not make them.
And the feedback from the audience?
Pete: Yeah. Well it was lukewarm here this evening. I do not know why that was.
Gregory: We had some technical problems tonight.
Pete: This is one of the big problems at such a festival. I didn't have my drums. I'm still reading. Tony's keyboards went down.
Gregory: And that is where experience is needed, when things are not going great. We start the gig and the keyboards crashed about ten times during the gig. That threw Tony.
Pete: I have once played with a band for thirteen years. Sometimes while playing at a festival we heard nothing. Nothing on our monitors except drums. Then you're on autopilot, but you know the stuff so well and intimately. Tonight the sound wasn't great since there was no soundcheck and we are still learning. These are not gripes, they are not like "please, forgive us" cause this is life, this is how it is.
Coming over to festivals like this on the mainland does help to spread the name of the band a bit.
Gregory: Yeah, it raises our profile. Next time we come over there will be some radio shows that are happy to have us play some kind of acoustic set. We certainly have to get out more and this guy (pointing to Pete) will help us do that. I think it will ensure that the band will continue to do more albums and to go in new directions.
Pete: That's a nice place to stop.