April download online now

April's download (the second in our ongoing series of permanent downloads) is Fighter Command from the Gathering Speed album. It's available at www.bigbigtrain.com now. It's gone online a little bit late in the month because, basically, I forgot.

May's download will be online soon and, in June, we'll have something from the re-worked, re-mixed and re-mastered English Boy Wonders. Also coming soon, a video diary of the (re) making of EBW.

Wondering about adding the definite article

As you know, we've been spending the last few weeks rummaging around in our old toy cupboard and having a play with the master tapes of the English Boy Wonders album.

It's been a happy time for us, dusting off the old material. I don't play many guitar solos these days but used to play quite a few back then. I've chosen to re-record some of them and add a couple more, inspired by a recent purchase of an Epiphone Les Paul (Epiphone make tremendous guitars these days, at a fraction of the price of the American versions.)

Anyway, it'll soon be time for us to set aside our childish things and release the revised English Boy Wonders. After that we'll need to get back to the new album which is looming up as a rather formidable challenge. We want to sustain the progress we've made since Gathering Speed by making further improvements and refinements to our sound.

We're also wondering about improving our band name.

When I were a young lad, my toy cupboard contained the splendid No 1 Big Big Train set. It had red track and a blue locomotive. Andy has pointed out that my set also possessed the definite article - it was 'The Big Big Train' rather than 'Big Big Train.'



I quite like this and we're wondering whether we should release our next album under the band name of The Big Big Train. This would be a sort of reverse Pink Floyd situation as they started off as The Pink Floyd. After Pink Floyd removed the definite article, they went on to become wildly successful and famous and had real groupies and everything. Maybe the same would happen to us, but in reverse? Which means we'd be even less successful and famous and have even fewer groupies than the ones we haven't got now.

Embarrassing onstage moments

There's a nice thread on the Musician's Corner page on the Genesis Forum about embarrassing onstage moments. This one made me laugh: (courtesy of iamreal):

'I was playing a gig in Holland many years ago. As a sort of show-thing at the end of the last number I would sometimes get up from the drumkit and throw the sticks at it for the last beat. (well it was the seventies.) Anyway, this time I lost my balance and fell against the back of the stage. There happened to be a fire door which opened as I fell against it and the next moment I was OUTSIDE! How I didn't break my neck I don't know. It was about a four foot drop so I couldnt get back in so I went around to the front entrance. There, they wouldn't let me in. Kept saying "band finished, closed". In the end the other band members came looking for me and I got back in!'

Download of the month - March 2008

As promised, we've started our free audio download service on the http://www.bigbigtrain.com/ site.

All songs we upload will be the full-length versions in high quality audio. We'll add a song every month and they'll stay on the site, which means that over the years we will eventually make available the full catalogue of BBT material for free download.

We're not becoming a charitable concern with this approach, we're simply trying an experiment to expand the number of listeners we have. As every listener is a potential buyer, we think it's worth exploring. We know that we cannot control illegal downloading and our CD's are pretty easy to find if somebody wants to grab them online.

The download service allows us to get some additional publicity on a monthly basis and will expand the number of people who visit our site. We can control the quality of the audio and can encourage people to support the band by visiting our CD shop where we sell CD's as cheaply as we possibly can.

We'll also be uploading some new songs prior to album releases and some rarities from our back catalogue, so it should be of interest to existing listeners as well as the curious.

Anyway, that's the theory.

The first track is Pick Up If You're There, from last year's Difference Machine CD. It's a good example of the current BBT sound, featuring Tony Wright on Van Der Graaf Generator*-influenced saxaphone, Becca King on viola, Pete Trewavas on bass and Nick D'Virgilio on drums.

Next month will be Fighter Command from the Gathering Speed CD and in May or June we'll upload a song from the forthcoming re-mixed, re-mastered and partly re-constructed English Boy Wonders album.

Greg

*the new VDGG album is worth checking out, despite the lack of Jaxon sax.

Thirsty Apes

We recorded another five songs with Nick D'Virgilio yesterday; mostly short tunes from along the way which, for one reason or another, never made it onto an album (Rob: 'These are fucking dregs. When are you going to write some proper stuff?') but also one longer piece which is a possible contender for English Electric.

The short songs may, indeed, be leftovers. But, like cold turkey on Boxing day, they are quite tasty and will be making an appearance on our retrospective CD which is coming out after the English Boy Wonders re-release and the new album.

Rob and Nick have been working on the new Spock's Beard live DVD and we had a listen to a few of the surround mixes after the session. It's gonna be a great release; I couldn't get 'On a Perfect Day' out of my head and sang it all the way to the curry house (I think Nick really appreciated hearing my vocal performance over and over. He mentioned that he'd never realised some of the notes I was singing even existed; don't be surprised if some of the subtleties of my rendition influence the SB live performances in the summer.)

After a few beers, Nick told us an unusual and alarming story about Giraffes. Which prompted Steve Thorne to suggest we check out this YouTube video (warning: may offend; do not click on the link if you are squeamish or have young children looking over your shoulder.)

English boys wondering how to play our old songs

Our Russian distributers MALS have asked if they can re-release our CD from 1997, English Boy Wonders. EBW was deleted by our then record label GEP a few years ago and we've been looking at options for making this music available again, so this is a very timely opportunity.

Rather than simply re-release the album as it was, we thought we'd go back to the existing tapes and brush them up a bit. EBW was a difficult release for BBT as it was recorded during a period when we were not sure about our future with GEP and, indeed, what direction we wanted to take with our music. We could only afford short periods of time in the studio back then before we had to stop and save some more cash to progress the recordings (and, in fact, we blew most of our budget doing a grand-piano session in a hideously expensive studio.) Money problems led to the album being recorded over a protracted timeframe and, what, with all the uncertainty over the future of the band, EBW never quite hung together as I intended it to.

Furthermore, the reviewers in 1997 didn't get the album at all; the combination of influences on EBW from the pastoral English pop of XTC, via the doom and gloom of The Cure to the dynamics and complexity of Genesis and King Crimson didn't impress. So, it sank without trace taking with it, into the undertow, our recording contract with GEP.

Now, more than ten years on, we think we can make EBW the album it should have been. We're currently going through the process of doing some extra work on each of the songs before we do a complete re-mix. Just transferring the keyboard parts onto the much better sounding samples of organ and Mellotron which we use now has made a huge difference, but we're doing a fair bit of additional recording as well.

In addition to the recording work, which is now well underway, our artist Jim Trainer has been working on some additional paintings for the album cover (a slide show of his paintings can be seen on our MySpace page).

Technically, the redux version of EBW has been an interesting experience. The album was originally recorded on three TEAC digital 8-track tape machines (the ones stacked up behind me in thie picture above from 1996). These were Rob's replacement for his 2 inch tape machine on which we recorded our first album.

Rob was getting rid of the machines a couple of years ago and he and Andy backed up the original multi-track session onto Pro-Tools. We had no idea whether there had been any deterioration in the tapes before we transferred them, but in fact they were in pristine condition. (when we did a similar exercise with the 2 inch tapes for Goodbye to the Age of Steam, the tapes had to be baked to restore them.)

Whilst the tapes didn't let us down, there were a couple of problems with some old midi files that had been saved on an ancient version of Cubase which ran from two floppy discs (which Andy had lost.) Dave Meros (thanks Dave) managed to retrieve the files for us and e-mailed them back over.

I'll finish with another couple of photos from the days of English Boy Wonders. Here we are rehearsing for the album sessions:

And here are Tony and Andy recording the piano ('every fuck-up costs an extra £200, but no pressure, Tony.')

Reviews: the good and the bad(ly written)

Had a couple of high profile reviews in English magazines in the last week or two: a nice one by Geoff Barton in Classic Rock (7/10, 'finely crafted and acutely involving') and a rubbish one in Power Play (5/10, 'progressive rock lite'). To make matters worse, the BBT review in Power Play was on the same page as a review of one of my daughter's favourite bands, Nightwish. Nightwish are a Finnish emo band. They sound like Abba, with heavy metal guitars. And they got 10/10. This amused my daughter (Ellie) no end.

I know it's sensible not to get annoyed by bad reviews, but having a couple of years' work dismissed in a hundred words of badly written prose is a tad irritating. And, really, I'm not just being bitter; the reviewer can't write. Consider this sentence, for example:

'If your (sic) a Big Big Train fan, then I guess your (sic) probably used their sound (sic) and will get a huge amount out of this release.'

Call yourself a journalist? Journalism lite, that's what I call it.

ps - on the same page as our Classic Rock review, one of Ellie's other favourite bands, Bullet For My Valentine* had their new album reviewed. They got 5/10. Ha ha!

* Bullet For My Valentine are a Welsh emo band. They sound like Tom Jones, with heavy metal guitars.

Frost, Hyperventilate, unplugged

Do check out this cracking version of Frost's Hyperventilate, played in unplugged-style by Jem Godfrey and Declan Burke.

Jem's keyboard playing is spectacularly good and the arrangement really shows off the quality of the composition.

Light Speed

Went to see Allan Holdsworth at The Brook in Southampton a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, hardly anyone else went; the Brook is a tiny venue but it was less than half full - maybe 80 people. Holdsworth is a legendary figure, a highly influential guitarist with astounding technique. He was, briefly, a member of UK and played in Bill Bruford's band before releasing a number of solo albums. He plays really really fast, which is why I made the photo of him look a bit blurry (it's not camera shake, honest.) Holdsworth's band featured two other gifted and high-profile musicians, Chad Wackerman (Zappa, Petrucci, Vai) on drums and Jimmy Johnson on bass. Jimmy played on Roger Waters' Amused to Death which is a very good thing to have been involved with.

I can't imagine why so few people turned up for the gig. Ok, fusion isn't everyone's cup-of-tea, being short on hummable tunes and, to some extent, emotional impact, but these guys perform at the very highest level of technical ability on their respective instruments. Still, the lack of audience meant we got to stand right at the front, which was nice.

Incidentally, Alan Holdsworth is 61 years old. He looks great for his age, don'tcha think?

Back in the studio

Back in the studio yesterday for some more recording. Phil and Thomas from Thieves Kitchen popped in for a listen. Their shortly-to-be-released album sounds very interesting.

I asked Thomas who else he had played for as Phil had mentioned he had done some previous recording and he said, 'oh, I used to be in this band in Sweden called Anglagard .'

'What??!!' I replied whilst falling off the studio couch.

I've been hunting for the two Anglagard albums for several months as I've heard that they were essential listening.

According to the Anglagard website, Thomas is taking a PHD in theoretical fusion plasma physics at Oxford. If I had known that yesterday I would, of course, have entered into a detailed and informed discussion with Thomas about nuclear stuff which would certainly have moved his PHD forward by some years. As it was, I spent most of my time trying to blag one of those rare Anglagard CD's from him.

Unfortunately, he hadn't got any copies either.

Interview

Stuart Cameron's new Progressive Rock Review website features a recent interview with me.

Stuart's show features extended conversations with prog musicians and is being promoted through a number of radio stations and iTunes.

The Colony of Slippermen

Do check out this cover version of Slippermen (free download) - it's very very clever.

The musicians who worked on this with Nick are session players for country and western songs. It's such a weird song, I would love to know what they made of it.

Chuffed as nuts

After a mad burst of creativity (the most productive I've ever had) the writing for the follow-up album to The Difference Machine, English Electric, is pretty much done. Still a lot of work to do on arrangements and recording, but we'll be looking for a 2008 release (although that may slip into 2009 if we finish towards the end of next year.)

Listeners can expect a similar line-up of musicians to The Difference Machine (with maybe one or two extra guests on the keyboards) a slightly more diverse selection of songs, our first 20 minute epic, and, I think, a cracking album.

Current tracklisting:

The Underfall Yard
Victorian Brickwork
Master James of St George
An as yet untitled song
At the Water's Edge
Oceania
Available Light

We'll also be trying to finish off the retrospective of previously unreleased or re-recorded material that we've been promising for ages. Problem is, new songs always take priority, but we will be aiming to get this released in 2010 for our 20th anniversary.

Terrorized

Terrorizer magazine has been doing a series of very interesting articles on prog rock in their last three issues. The cover CD for the new issue which is out today and which concludes their look at the state of prog, features Big Big Train. They've found space for the full length version of Perfect Cosmic Storm on the CD, alongside tracks from Dream Theatre, Porcupine Tree and others.

According to Terrorizer, our music is 'unashamed, unreconstructed PROG FUCKIN' ROCK' and we are 'bound to please fans of Yes, the Enid and early Genesis.' As I kind of expected, most of the other bands on the CD are from the heavier end of the prog spectrum rather than the symphonic side of things and I'm not so sure that we'll please the average Terrorizer reader, but it's nice to see our name on the news stands.

Excerpts from a new interview

I've just been interviewed by Kristian Selm of Progressive Newsletter. Looks like it'll be fully published in December, but some excerpts here: Interview

Greg

Bloody hell, another cracker from Oceansize

The third brilliant album in a row from Oceansize.

If you've not come across Oceansize before, and you'd like to try some prog coming from an alternative rock direction, please give them a listen. Their new album, like their others, is complicated, gothic, intense and heavy (but without any silly widdly widdly guitar wanking.)

You can hear some samples on their MySpace page.

They also have a new official website which tells you all about their current tour (warning: if you do go to see them, earplugs are strongly recommended if you want to avoid tinnitus.)

And this Wikipedia article gives some background on the band.

Greg

New song - Available Light

We've just spent some time with Nick D'Virgilio working on material for the follow up album to The Difference Machine, English Electric.

Here is a brief clip of Nick in action on a couple of sections of a new song called Available Light.

If you prefer to watch at Youtube, it's also here.

**Quality-control warning - it's only hand-held camcorder footage and all the music is at guide-part stage, so apologies for the wobbly vocals, made-up words, crap bits etc.**

Painting the music

Our official artist, James Trainer, has his own My Space page with a huge amount of artwork for past (and future) Big Big Train releases. He has Summer's Lease playing in the background and, maybe it's the melancholy of autumn and having drunk the best part a bottle of wine, but the paintings and the music seem to blend into one another.

Do stop by if you get the chance. Jim started off as a BBT fan, but we're all now Jim Trainer fans.

Prognosis / Babyblaue reviews

We've picked up some nice reviews so far, let's hope they keep coming. Here is another one at ProgGnosis.

And one (in German) at Babyblaue Seiten. If I read this one correctly, they give the album as a whole 12/15, and then give an individual mark to Perfect Cosmic Storm of 15/15. Which is nice.

Another review here...

Progarchives

and a nice comment on the Doctor of Prog Rock blog

and a comment from Dave Meros on the Spock's Beard site.

A couple of new pics

We've been recording some new songs for the next album, English Electric. Here are a couple of new pics taken at Aubitt Studios.

Hurrah - the CD's have arrived!

The CD's have finally arrived here at English Electric. Three years' work, all distilled into a small plastic object. As I write, several members of BBT are frantically packaging up CD's for the pre-sale orders. We start shipping tomorrow and hope to have all of the pre-sales posted by Tuesday next week (apart from orders from those who asked for signed copies. We have a holiday issue with one band member, so there will be a short delay on signed CD's)

Greg

Interview with Andy, Greg and Sean

There is a new interview with us online here: MySpace interview.
I think you probably need to have a MySpace account to read it.

It's a beautiful day today, blue skies and extremely hot in Bournemouth. I should be on the beach, but I'm catching up with BBT admin instead. I've got the DVD of Spaced on in the background, however, so I'm not too bothered about being inside.

The first batch of CD's are due with us next week and the official release date is the 17th September. We'll close the pre-order special offer on the 16th September.

Greg

First review

The first review of The Difference Machine is in, and it's a very positive one indeed.

It can be found here on Progressive Ears.

The Progressive Ears homepage is here. It is an extremely good prog rock forum.

Free downloads, cheap CD's, what does it all mean?

There have been a few raised eyebrows about two aspects of our promotional campaign for The Difference Machine - the low pre-release price of the CD and the availability of 30 minutes of music from the album for free download.

There has been quite a bit of debate in the band about this, and I don't think any of us are sure that it's the right thing to do. Should we give music away free of charge? Is it right to price our CD's at the lowest end of the range of prices for new releases?

Aside from the arguments about paying a proper price for creative work, it also costs money to run this band (gear, studio time, production costs etc.) Are we selling ourselves short? With Gathering Speed, we just about broke even; before that release, we'd lost money.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how the band operates as a minor player in what is (in sales terms) increasingly a minority genre. A number of different factors have led me to the conclusion that the free downloads / cut-price CD's idea has to be worth pursuing. I'll come to these factors in a minute.

Firstly, about the minority genre issue. Whilst prog is no longer the music that dare not speak its name, there is no doubt that the glory days of progressive rock are long since gone. Bands with a prog influence may become very successful (Radiohead are a good example), but no out-and-out prog band is going to have the influence and success that Genesis and Yes did in the 1970's.

There used to be a well trodden path for progressive bands which started with them making music within the prog genre and ended with a more commercial approach. Most of the 70's bands did it (probably because of the influence of punk and new wave and the resultant pressure from the record labels) and many of the 80's bands (eg Marillion, IQ) followed a similar route (I remember Twelfth Night becoming glam-rockers almost overnight. They became shit almost overnight as well.)

Now, there is a kind of reverse trend. For the most part, the 90's and Noughties bands are falling over their Mellotrons to show how prog they are. This can lead to retro-style music (IQ's Dark Matter, bits of our own Gathering Speed) or music with a more contemporary approach (eg Frost). But either way, the trend is towards longer songs, concept albums and tricky time signatures (these recent comments from The Flower Kings' Roine Stolt are an example of the current mind-set: Flower Kings Forum)

I think this is all happening because the bands know the game is up. They're not going to make much money out of progressive music, they suck at writing commercial material and any attempt to satisfy the dedicated fan base whilst simultaneously attracting a newer audience with poppier material is doomed. Therefore, they may as well go back to the music they are most comfortable with and preach to the converted.

Actually, Jem Godfrey from Frost, currently the best music blogger around, put all this much better here: The New Cube (scroll down to the Cake or Death post.)

In the same post, Jem also talked about the impact of downloading on musicians. And this is where I come back to the issue of the Big Big Train offer of free downloads and cut-price CD's which is where I started (nifty link, huh?)

I happened to be in Barbados when I read Jem's blog post on downloading and prog rock. Nice place, Barbados. There are a some very rich people there and many more relatively poor ones. Despite these extremes, people get along together pretty well. There are great schools which instill in the children a work ethic and a pride in the island.

I know about the schools because I got to know a very amiable taxi-driver called Adrian who was passionate about Barbados, who had heard of Phil Collins but not Genesis, and who was into science fiction and fantasy (some proghead tendencies then.) Anyway, Adrian had invested a huge amount of money in buying his taxi and had, I guess, very little disposable income. He can't afford to travel much or to buy many DVD's or CD's, but he does have access to a computer and torrenting software. And he had amassed quite a collection of pirated tv shows.

I've done a bit of torrenting myself, just for bootlegs of Genesis stuff, but the extent of downloading that Adrian and his friends were doing was an eye-opener.

I read another post whilst I was in Barbados, this one from Nick Barrett on the Pendragon forum which took the opposite viewpoint from Jem Godfrey's. Nick feels that downloading is really hurting the band and may put them out of business. And this from Martin Orford: scroll down to find the post. Martin would rather have one fan who purchased a CD than two million who download the album.

If there is a weakness in Nick and Martin's argument it is that the majority of those downloaders probably wouldn't buy an album in the first place. The direct cause and effect is difficult to judge. Some people download and don't expect to pay a bean, others download and then go on to buy because they like what they hear and I guess there is a whole spectrum of people in between.

A few years back I did go through a stage of buying a lot of CD's from other new prog bands to check them out, often guided by some ecstatic reviews. The CD's were expensive (a tenner or more) and often extremely disappointing, and that made me far less likely to try music without hearing it first. And there is a lot of music out there. There are many more prog bands releasing albums into a much smaller marketplace than there were in the 70's when the prog bands were kings. And as well as music, there is so much more for people to spend their money on than in the 70's, and the internet has brought wider choice into everyone's homes.

So, why should I expect anybody to spend their money on Big Big Train? And how can I stop illegal downloading of our albums? (a full version of Gathering Speed was online for illegal download within two days of release.)

I had a chat with Malcolm Parker of GFT / Cyclops the other day. GFT are the major UK independent prog rock store and Malcolm has kept his operation going for many years, so he know his market well. Malcolm believes that CD price is the main driver of sales these days. It pisses him off, because he thinks that many very good albums are being ignored for cheaper and weaker products. But it's something he's having to deal with and, where possible, his prices have fallen dramatically in recent years (there are some wide variations in price on his site - between £7 and £12 for new CD's and these variations are, I assume, all dictated by the price he can buy the CD's in for.)

It is easy to be critical of those that are buying cheaper rather than best, but we all make decisions about purchasing items every day and price is always a factor. I like wine and I prefer good wine (and mostly I think I can tell the difference) but I still find myself drawn to the half-price offers in the supermarkets, even though I know some of the prices were artificially inflated in the first place to make the wine seem like a bargain.

To conclude, we are in a highly competitive market competing against other products and, to some extent, other bands. Pirating via downloading has added another element. Some downloaders may go on to buy CD's, most won't. I can't change that.

Our goal is to try to bring those downloaders of our music who don't normally pay, into the market place, and to try to get people who don't know much about our music to at least give it a listen. So, we offer up about half of the album for free and take the price of the CD down as low as we can get it.

First results are promising. I'll let you know how we get on in the longer term.

Greg