I apologize to Colin Bass for forgetting to put this interview on my website. It did appear in iO Pages already some time ago, but for the website it simply slipped by.
I guess we could start with Kartini. Last November Abraxas played in the Netherlands and they were already selling your album at the concert.
Yes, it was Martin of Abraxas.
And later it came out on Kartini, right?
Yes, it is a co-production between Oskar in Poland and Kartini, which is my label based in in Berlin. And ehm Witold (Andree) was quicker of the mark than me, so he managed to get the album out first. Martin had some advance copies and he sold a few at the Abraxas gig here and we released ours at the beginning of this year.
It struck me as strange at the time. You are a rather well-known musician and then there's this album out of the blue on a Polish label.
Well, yes, but it was a pre-release.
How did you come to playing with all these Polish musicians?
Well it came about after playing with Camel in Poland on the 1997 on the Coming Of Age tour. That was how we met Quidam. Ewa and Emilia, they played with us on the stage. They did the intro to Harbour Of Tears. Ewa played the flute - she's no longer in the band - and Emilia sang the part and it was great. That was where we made contact with them. After that tour I went to Indonesia to record my second Sabah Habas Mustapha album, Jalan Kopo, and when I came back from there I thought I might as well put it out on my own label and might as well put it out in Poland. Through Quidam I came into contact with Andree of Oskar and we got talking about distribution. And then I went there to do a solo concert and we were talking of doing a production together perhaps with members of Quidam and Abraxas. When I went to Poznan to do a solo acoustic concert, we had a look at the local studio and found it to be very very good and we just decided to do a co-production.
Why do you release this album now? I know you have these albums by Sabah Habas Mustapha and so why now this? Was it already long in the planning?
Well, yes. Euh, it is the realization of these things. I don't know why. It's that the timing was just right and it came together and I had some songs, it was an idea I was working on. I had also been thinking of how to do it, a solo Colin Bass album aimed at the people who know my name, mainly the Camel audience. And so it was a question of the opportunity arising, of the right material coming together and that's it really. And also it kind of came out of the first Sabah Habas Mustapha album I did in Indonesia, which was called Denpasar Moon. It was this song, which became a big success in Indonesia by about fifty different artists, sold millions. So I began working there a lot more, going into the studios there. I was reading a lot of Joseph Conrad at the time, because it is very atmospheric and set in the South of Asia at the beginning of this century and my ideas came out of reading this particular book and also my experiences of being completely somewhere else and also out of my experiences being an Englishman living in Berlin for twelve years. And thinking about, for anybody, to be removed from your past.
Was this book by Conrad called An Outcast Of The Islands?
Yes, yes. But it is not really a concept album. It was inspired by it. It was one of the inspirations for some of the songs. I was reading a book while certain thoughts came into my mind about isolatiom, making contact or losing contact with your roots. The character in the book is a very unsympathetic guy, this Willems. Actually he is Dutch in the book, but I turned him into an Englishman. He's away from Holland and he's in South-East Asia, but he doesn't learn anything from his experiences. And so some of the songs are reflections of that: that if you don't learn and adapt, to change yourself to see outside yourself you will meet a nasty end, like Willems does in the book. I could go on for a long time about this.
But you don't want to?
Oh yes, as soon as I get going...in a minute. But maybe ask me some more questions.
So how did this cover of Denpasar Moon end up on the album?
I got my name Sabah Habas Mustapha from being in a band called 3 Mustaphas 3. We played in Holland quite a lot in the eighties. And we were a cult thing in the States and Japan and we toured there a lot. It was through that that I got the first Japanese deal to do the first Sabah Habas Mustapha album in Indonesia. So that was why I carried on the name. It was just something that was rolling along in that direction. Denpasar Moon was also the starting point for the Outcast album. This album develops in a more serious way ideas that I had while working on the new Sabah Habas Mustapha album. But SHM is more of an entertainer, it is more of a wild and wacky guy. I also wanted something that enabled me to write some more serious music.
Listening to the album the songs are rather diverse, but there's also a strong similarity in mood. Like this first instrumental. It sounds rather hasty, but still there's this warmness to it. What kind of mood where you after?
Well I think you just described it very well. I wanted something definitely warm, lush and tropical. Something that takes its time to grow, but is quite thick and lush.
But not tropical in the sense of salsa or latin. More subdued.
Yes, it is more inspired by landscape than culture or people. Maybe I can get really pretentious by saying that it is inspired by inner landscapes, inner feeling. You know, you could go around the world, everywhere and still looking for your home. You can go to somewhere, a very beautiful place, or be born there and still be very miserable. You carry all that with you, you carry your happiness with you, your potential for happiness within yourself. And this is what happens to this character in the book: he can't get there, cause he doesn't know what it is, he doesn't believe in it. And at the end of it all I wanted to give an alternative end to the book, to the concept or whatever it is. Actually if you end up by taking responsibility for yourself, that's perhaps your key to salvation. When I looked down inside of me, I only saw what I wanted to see. It must have been somebody else who was to blame. Now I know this situation you know, because I and a lot of people have been doing it: you have to get to the point where can take responsibility for your own life and how you are towards other people and that was the thing I wanted to examine. Because if you are constantly down there, blaming other people for things that go wrong, then you will never advance. Realizing that you have to work for other people, feel for people.
The tracks on the album that may be surprising to some are the orchestral pieces. How did they come about?
It surprised me too, very much. Andree said to me that this studio in Poznan is also the home of an orchestra. They practiced there in the mornings which was very nice to see before we started recording. And he said we could hire them if we liked if I had some pieces to play. Funnily enough I had been working on some orchestral pieces for a synthesizer. It was a soundtrack for a film which showed footage from within the womb. It was starting with a heartbeat and I was making some long themes to accompany the slow growing embryo. So I started to turn this into a piece and started editing, bringing some of the themes in earlier, to make just the piece for a thirteen member chamber orchestra. That was ambitious enough for me. I guess I've always had this fear of rocking musicians working with orchestras.
So no complete symphony.
[asphyxiating]No, I don't think so, no. I am not worthy. I guess it is hard enough trying to write three minutes for a chamber orchestra, but it was great to do really.
But it seems to just kind of happened.
Well it did. I just happened to work on this thing and then the opportunity came up to work with the orchestra. I find this happens to me a lot. Maybe it is a matter of focus. How many things happen to us, because we are really saying: that is what I want to do and so we focus on that. How many of us are just going along rising to the opportunities that come along. I am definitely in the second category. There are so many thing that I would like to do, that I can't quite make up my mind and while I make up my mind, life is going past. Isn't it terrible?
How does the music of SHM compare to Colin Bass solo?
Well they both know about five different chords. So they work with more or less the same thing.
That is all they have in common?
Well, no. They both have this melancholy nature and occasionally erupt into wild rock 'n' roll when they think "Sod this! Too much melancholy, let's party". This kind of tension between melancholy and the ability to rock out a little bit. That's why this album is much rougher live than on the album. That is the nature of live music and also I enjoy that more. I like to have a bit of danger in there.
We first saw you in Nighttown playing with Camel on the Harbour Of Tears tour and live when you played it much more concisely than on record it sounded it much better, more potent.
Maybe that is because you see us doing it, but also because it was difficult to do that: at some point we were all playing keyboards and then playing bass and Andy guitar you really had to concentrate to get through the set. In rehearsing that for four people -- most of it was Andy and Andy and Andy overdubbed so many times -- you have strip down to what is basic, what makes it move along, make it work. So you have to take the major themes so actually that already puts it more into focus. So all the extraneous things that you put on a record - or Andy puts on a record, because he thinks oh I gotta have that twelve string and the strings coming in here - and of course we didn't have that luxury live. We had to say: these are the major themes and we play these and it still works and it is even more exciting.
It is a bit strange to realize that live it sounds better than in the studio.
I think it is part of the fact that these things are all work in progress anyway. I also find that anyway with Camel and the various other groups I worked with. You rehearse a new set of songs to do an album and then you go into the studio and you record them and you end up with something you hope will be pretty good. But then you go onto the road, you rehearse in a different way, and when you are playing things you find other things you can add in and by the time you get to the stage, the numbers themselves are transforming. To me that is not unusual. By the time you get something to the stage, of course it is gonna change, develop. And while we are on tour of course it will change again. Nothing is fixed and so it is so difficult when people come and say: but it doesn't sound like the album. Because A) it is difficult to do all the time, because the medium is different and B) isn't it boring to have it exactly the same way all the time?
I prefer to have it more concise live. In the studio you can do the things that are impossible live, but live I prefer to have energy.
And you have to entertain people. Entertainment is a wonderful thing.
Now we are more or less on the Camel subject anyway, there was this rumour that Andy Latimer would come along to play.
Yes, as I have been telling everybody who asked me, this was one of these accidents. I must take the resonsibility like I said before. It was my fault for actually saying to somebody who I thought I could trust, namely one of the agents who asked me since Andy was also on the album. When he asked I had just been talking to Andy about it. And Andy said "Wow, I'd love to come and play guitar, Wow fantastic.". Nothing Andy would love more to just come over and get on the stage and play without having the responsiblity for being the guy who is paying everybody and being the guy who is doing all the interviews and have some fun for a change. So we all thought it was a good idea and we kept it as an option if we finished the album in time. I happened to mention this and I told the agent to keep it secret cause for one thing it may not happen. Just before this tour Dave (Stewart, drummer of Camel and Colin Bass solo) and I had been in California to play with Andy working on the new album. Having planned a certain amount of work, it might happen that we could do it in time, Andy might change his mind, in fact who knows what might happen. And also, it has to be kept secret, because once promotors get hold of it they'll start advertising it and people will see three of Camel on stage plus an unknown keyboard player -- which is the usual state of events -- and they will assume it is Camel and ask why we won't play Camel material. Because if Andy came, we wouldn't play any Camel songs, for that particular reason. Because we didn't want promotors running away with the idea that they were getting a cheap version of Camel. In the end we realized that this was getting more complicated and I started to get the feeling that this would get out of hand and anyway what happened was that while we were doing the album we got some technical problems and Andy had a bad tooth for a day and had to go off to be operated upon. So we lost time and when Dave and I left we left Andy there with a mountain of overdubs to do and a deadline, because the album should be out by September, meaning that it has to be mastered by June. And I'm glad that he is not here, because I do it myself now. Although of course we are still the best of friends, but at least this way I'll be able to play some Camel numbers -- which the crowd expects -- and Andy thinks that's fine. He wouldn't play a Camel number without being in control and now I can take a Camel number and play them the way I want to. It is simple as that. I have put my album in the middle and I hope people will like it too. In Poland we haven't had any problem, because the album is doing well there and the people came along and they loved the album and the Camel tracks are just a bonus.
Like Quidam also plays a Camel track.
The moral of the whole story is: keep your mouth shut, don't trust anybody. Otherwise a lot of people get false information. As soon as we decided that it was out of hand -- I had a ticket for him as an option -- I informed the agents involved and that was a month ago and now he is still on the posters and everything. I have e-mail contacts with some Camel fans in Holland through the homepage and they e-mailed me about Andy coming so I could tell them no, and please circulate this information he is definitely coming. So I have certainly done my best not to disappoint anybody.
But on the other hand I think the music will sound familiar to Camel fans. If people like Harbour of Tears they will probably like Outcast as well.
Well, being the pretentious bore that I am, I tend to call my music post-modern progressive and that is that I took the progressive background of Camel as one of my inspirations and what I've learned from being with Camel and also what I've contributed to Camel, the voice, the bass, I tried to build on that, but I also tried to bring in other aspects of music that I like. Because there is so much music that I like. I get a little impatient with people who are really in one groove. It drives me up the wall sometimes. Some people can't even listen to American music, because it is not hip. You've just got to listen to the latest West African singer whose lyrics you can't understand. So in searching for somebody else's roots they forget their own. I don't want do that. I want to remember my roots, but I also want to be able to pull in other things. So I've pulled in, in a very, very subtle way, some Indonesion tone patterns in the album. But also you know I like to bash away on the acoustic guitar and to sing a country song or sing a folk song.
That is true. Your music is more varied than the average Camel album.
Well that is the luxury I have. I mean I think Andy could have the luxury of being a bit more freeer. That is also why I was very keen to get Andy contributing to this album, not to think about it too much. Halfway through recording I took the tapes over to California, spent a week over there and got Andy to play on about half of the tracks. And it was great, I mean Andy is a funny guy, great company, and basically what it is is that he is such a perfectionist -- which is why his albums take such a long time -- that he keeps working and working on one piece. Sometimes I am spontaneous in my way and I think that often the first thing is the best. In a lot of the tracks, the things he plays are the first things he played. And I said: "Okay, thank you. Next track". And he went "Oh no, want a minute, that not is a little bit sour". And I said Andy, it is fantastic, it is just what I want. It got this rough edge to it, that he would have smoothed out. But I wanted that out of him. I think that was good for him, cause he could play in a slightly different style. One number, on Denpasar Moon, I said play it in fifties style guitar and he told me that it was amazing, that he always wanted to play like Hank Marvin. But he never dared to do it. I mean he's great Hank Marvin fan, that was his first inspiration.
Maybe he should make some Sabah albums as well?
Yeah, yeah that would be good. We talked about that as well. All kinds of potential for the future.
But in the end you wanted the music to be you?
Yes. Actually it was for my mom who always asked why I did not record music under my own name. Now I have done this album, she can go out and show it to all her friends.
Now they will believe. I even saw a few singles released?
Yes, that was from Witolds side. That was the Oskar idea. They released As Far As I Can See with Sailing Home from the last Sabah Habas Mustapha album Jalan Kopo, which is kind of the cross over between Sabah and Colin. It could actually fit on An Outcast Of The Islands. And a couple of tracks from the live concert I did in Poznan. I haven't put this out on my label since I don't think the live tracks are that great, but they are available on the tour (in fact, the single also contains an outtake of the Outcast album called Poznan Pie, played as an encore during the concert).
But they are generally not available outside Poland.
No. But I've recently done an edit of Goodbye To Albion for a single. I've cut out all the good bits, [laughter] so now people will like it. And yes we are thinking of putting that out as a single or at least as a promotional thing for radio. All these things have to happen slowly. If you have this small label without the staff of publicity people.
Releasing a single is quite expensive.
Well it is actually...well what you want to do with it?
Well, promote it.
If you promote it, you need a budget for this and a time to do it and somebody to do it for you. But I guess we'll get some of these singles out to radiostations and see what happens. I hope these are long term thing that maybe -- I mean they will not be big hits -- but like the Camel things, they still sell.
So you are definitely going to record more Colin Bass albums?
Oh, yes definitely. After this I got to do some more vocals for the Camel album. Then I will take a holiday and at that time I will start writing, while I'm on holiday. I mean I can't just lie around and do nothing. Then later in the year definitely start working on a new album. Exactly when and what that will be I'm not sure yet.
Again in Poland? I don't see why not, cause bloody hell, the next thing I have to do in May is to go back to Warsaw and I will mix the live album. One of the shows we did in Poland was in a theatre and was recorded for a radiostation, radio station 3 in Warsaw. Two hundred people, invited audience were present. They had had to phone to the radiostation to get in. They gave away three every three hours. A wonderfully mixed audience. At some point I was standing singing in the audience to some middle aged little "If you are the one to make it" she was having kittens. It was wonderful. And this was going out live and fortunately this was quite a good performance I think, I have heard a cassette of it. So I thought okay, in May I can go back and mix it and release it as an official bootleg. So there is that to do. Definitely a new album before the end of this year, to be made. I don't know when it will be out. I think the 1st of January would be a good day.
Or maybe not?
Hmm, yes maybe we could wait awhile. You know, what I don't understand is all these people wanting to make babies to have the first one in the new millenium. I mean do you want to go into the hospitable and have a maybe at midnight?
They might think it a glorious end?
I don't know. It's the mothers I feel sorry for, not to mention the kids. But with the Y2K potential problems. I'm going to be sitting at home and watch it on television.
What about this new Camel album. What will it be like?
Well, what is live without mystery.
Well okay.
I think there should be some mystery in this. But I must say it is actually quite different from the last one although it has to me it is sort of, it echoes different periods of Camel. For me, this is not intentional on Andy's part, this is only my personal impression so far. I'm sure it will sound different when I get back. For me it has echoes of Moonmadness type stuff, because that was basically what we were going for, a more live sound. Dave myself and Andy basically playing as a three piece live in the studio, without a keyboardplayer. So there would be more guitar on the album. And it was great, great to work as a three piece. We had some great jam sessions and it was beautiful. And then some of it is with the computer, some computerized keyboards, that will gradually be placed by live keyboards. Those are more in the line of Harbour Of Tears. It has some melodic echoes of that. And then there are some pieces that sound quite new. That's all I can say. I think it will be a very fresh and dynamic album.
Will you also tour with them?
I don't know. That is always the problem. I'm always ready to do it, but of course it is quite a big undertaking and takes an awful lot or organization. To make it work we have to do America, Japan, Europe and maybe South America, cause we get a lot of offers from down there all the time. We have to take each others schedules into consideration and we have to make sure it pays as much as possible. You know, you always lose money on tours. It's a promotional exercise. So it takes a lot of getting it all together, getting the right team together. It's something that takes a lot of planning. As they are now focusing on the album, I can't see a new tour happening before the new year.
When I first saw your album I was thinking that this was some project and really did not expect you to be touring?
No, and so did I. I didn't even think about, it just came about. It's that problem again, I don't know how it happened. How did I come here, what am I doing? It just started with doing some gigs with Quidam and then things started to get going in Poland and then two Spanish gigs came in and so it kind of grew a little bit.
One other rumour I heard over here was that also Abraxas would be playing.
Well not the band itself, but Martin and Simon two guys from Abraxas are here, cause they were both on the album. So I wanted them to bring them along to try and recreate the album as much as possible. I needed some support.
Well the stage seemed full enough.
But what should I do? Go on with a four piece? I can't do that yet. I still have to hear all the parts. And now Andy makes fun of me. I always complained about that during the Pressure Points tour: "There are too many keyboardplayers on stage. Damn, we couldn't get into it". And he would go yeah, yeah I needed this stuff behind me, I needed to hear all the parts of the record. Now he realizes we don't really need it, like in the Harbour of Tears tour. But then he couldn't yet. And now I'm doing it in the same way: two keyboard players, two guitarists, and Andy going "Nah. Four piece mate. Four piece.". He's right, he's right. But having said that, it's a lot of fun and it's a lot easier like this. Standing on stage pretending to play the guitar.
You also have people to blame if something goes wrong.
More people to blame. Yes, that's right, that's what it is. Get them around you.
We've had all we had to ask. Anything to add at this point.
Now not really. We have been going on long enough I would say.
Forty minutes.
Forty minutes? Fish would just be getting going.