The European Perspective: Far Skies Deep Time Exclusive

On September 25th, David 'Wilf' Elliott's The European Perspective show on the Dividing Line network featured an interview with David Longdon as well as an exclusive broadcast of the Far Skies Deep Time EP.

The show is now available to listen to online. There are two options; you can hear just the BBT bit here, or you can hear the whole 4 hour show (which includes the BBT bit as well as some very tasty music from other bands) here.

Just a reminder that the EP will be released on the 25th October and for the first two months (until Christmas Day, in fact) will only be available to buy if you are on the BBT mailing list. It is not too late to join said list and this can be easily be achieved by clicking here and following the instructions (if you've bought CD's directly from us before, you should already be on the list.)

We will start sending emails to people on the mailing list (with ordering information) in the next couple of days.

Far Skies Deep Time - insight

More insight on the forthcoming Far Skies Deep Time EP at David Longdon's blog.

The Underfall Yard on Spotify

The Underfall Yard is now available on the wonderful Spotify.

New CD coming soon: Far Skies Deep Time (EP)

Big Big Train with Rob Aubrey (photo by Amy Mumford)

We've finished recording our new EP and will shortly be back in the studio to mix and master it. The plan at the moment is to release Far Skies Deep Time in late October. There will be no pre-order campaign and initially it will only be available to those who are on our mailing list (if you've bought a CD directly from us in the past and haven't changed your email address recently, then you will feature on that list.)

The Far Skies EP is generously proportioned (about 41 minutes of music) and features the following track listing:

Master of Time
Fat Billy Shouts Mine
British Racing Green
Brambling
The Wide Open Sea

Master of Time is a cover of an Anthony Phillips song. Anthony and Mike Rutherford had originally planned to record Master of Time for inclusion on one of our favourite albums, The Geese and the Ghost, but ran out of time during the album sessions. A demo of the song appeared on the recent re-issue of The Geese and the Ghost. We thought it was a beautiful song which deserved a full band treatment and so decided to record our first ever cover. Ant has heard the BBT version of Master of Time and has given us his blessing and we do hope that we've done the song full justice.

Fat Billy Shouts Mine was originally part of a suite of music for The Underfall Yard album. We didn't get chance to finish recording the song in time for the album and so are pleased to be able to release it as part of the Far Skies EP.

British Racing Green and Brambling feature a lot of music within concise arrangements. We are very proud of these two songs which both tell the story of doomed relationships.

The EP concludes with the 17 minute The Wide Open Sea. This is a very different epic for us, very unlike our previous songs of this sort of length. It tells a story of Jacques Brel and is, I think, one of the best things we've done.

The Big Big Train line-up on Far Skies is:

Andy Poole
Dave Gregory
David Longdon
Greg Spawton
Nick D'Virgilio

and the EP also features Danny Manners on double bass, Jon Barry on guitar and Martin Orford on keyboards.

More news soon.

The Resurgence of Prog

Interesting new article on prog in The Guardian. Read it here.

In search of vintage sounds

Andy, firing up the Quattro

We've been struggling to replicate a couple of the keyboard sounds we used on Age of Steam and had decided we just had to accept the use of substitute sounds in one or two places.Then we found out that Martin Orford (who co-produced Age of Steam) was selling some of his gear. To our surprise, the list of items for sale included the Yamaha SY85 which he had brought in to the studio and used on the album back in 1994. It was this keyboard which had generated the missing sounds. So now we have access to them again. 

So many notes to choose from...

The list of items for sale also included Martin's Roland A-90 which was his main stage keyboard for many years, and we've taken the opportunity to try that out with a view to buying it. We've not owned an 88-note keyboard before and it is an impressively massive beast which is unlikely to be popular with roadies.

It's been fun firing up these vintage keyboards (especially as many of Widge's live patches are still in evidence) and as long as we can get the midi working on the A-90, I think we'll be buying it.

In sharp focus

Popped into Aubitt studios the other night for a chat with Rob and Mike Holmes, who are finishing off the new The Lens album.

The Lens was the immediate antecedent of IQ (which was formed out of the ashes of The Lens in the early 1980's.) When I heard that Mike was revisiting The Lens I was slightly sceptical; I wasn't sure what the point of it would be.

I was wrong to be unsure. Mike played us three of the tracks from the forthcoming album and they sounded absolutely brilliant. There were shades of Camel, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind (and, of course, IQ) in a setting of  contemporary sounds and with an almost Trance feel at times. It has been beautifully recorded as well.

I'm not sure when The Lens album will be released, but do check it out.

Inside and out

Outside, the sun is shining and the girls are looking ever more beautiful in their summer dresses. There is tennis, football and motor racing; there are music festivals, the beach, barbecues and beer. And yet we find ourselves staring, once again, at the walls of an airless recording studio, trying to nurse a number of different projects to completion.

In the last few years, a regular schedule of releases has enabled us to get noticed and build momentum. The new albums and reworked or remastered reissues have all done well for us in continuing to build an audience. In short, we need to keep working hard, as a lengthy gap between releases is not a good option for us.

So, work hard we must. We're 95% there with the Goodbye to the Age of Steam remix. And we're about three-quarters done with the new Far Skies Deep Time EP, too, with vocal sessions booked in for July and mixing in August. Both of those CD's will be fully completed by the end of the summer and should be out in the autumn.

Yesterday, we restarted work on the English Electric album, opening up sessions that we hadn't touched for a few months as we need to get them ready for drum recording in the winter. These sessions contain about 70 minutes of new songs and there is a huge pile of work to do on them to get them ready in time. Some of the songs are fairly complete, others more sketched out. We opened up two yesterday for a careful listen, one called East Coast Racer and another called Worked Out. Both of them sounded like they were full of  potential. It's the process of unlocking that potential that we need to crack on with.

In addition to Age of Steam, Far Skies and English Electric, David is developing ideas for our most ambitious project yet, which we'll aim to complete after English Electric in 2012 or 2013. This new project is shaping up to be a mighty piece of work.

So there is much going on at the moment, enough to keep us busy for some time to come.

And I am also conscious that we have had a number of amazing offers for gigs and festivals, so much so that we need to start thinking about whether we can afford to take some time out from our recording schedule to take up some of those offers. For now, recording and releasing music seems to be the way to build the band, but at some stage a change in tack may be necessary to take things to the next level. And it could be fun, too.

'Crap! That was loud'

Another fabulous weekend at the folk festival. Looks like the musket-fire during the parade may have been a tad loud for the good burghers of Wimborne, though. 

Fetchez la vache

Sadly, technical gremlins got in the way of the planned completion yesterday of the remix for the re-release of our first album, Goodbye to the Age of Steam. Rob ('you're paying me less than the minimum wage for this') Aubrey and Andy worked on until the early hours, but were unable to get it finished. Still, significant progress was made and we should be able to get things tied up with one more session. 

We've suddenly found ourselves with a whole heap of work to complete in the next few months. In addition to the Age of Steam remix, we need to finish off recording and mixing the Far Skies Deep Time EP that we're planning for an autumn release. The EP should come in at 40 minutes plus, so some might call it an album, but for us it's a (rather substantial) hors d'oeuvres (...betcha didn't know I could speak French...) before the release of the English Electric album, which is due in 2011.

And that's the other huge piece of work we need to do, because Nick D'Virgilio is due in England in the winter months and we need to get the whole of the album far enough along to record the

 drum sessions while he's here. So, there is much to keep us occupied.

As I'm writing this, I'm listening to the Age of Steam mixes we have completed. And mighty fine they are sounding, too. As my tweeting suggested yesterday, Age of Steam is a bit of a period piece as we were using many of the keyboard sounds which were fashionable in the early 1990's. By the time we got to 1997's English Boy Wonders, we had stripped things back mostly to guitar, organ and Mellotron, so the 2007 remix for that album allowed us to use the much improved samples of those instruments which are now available.

 For Age of Steam, though, we used a lot of sounds which lock the album into a more specific time frame. One of the decisions we had to take at the start of the remix was whether we should replace those sounds with something we might have used if we were making the album today.

After a bit of soul-searching we decided that we would stick to the orginal sound canvas for the album. This was a challenge in itself, as we no longer own the keyboards that we used back in 1994. And many of the keyboard parts for the album were not on the original 2 inch tapes, so we've had to recreate them using sounds which are as close to the original ones as possible. 

As well as a full remix of the original album, the Age of Steam re-release will feature a couple of bonus tracks. One of these is an extended version of Losing Your Way including a section of music we decided not to use on the album version. The other bonus track is a mashup of the two instrumental tracks on the album recorded by the Big Big Train of 2010 (featuring David on flute and keyboards and Nick on drums.) And of course, we use our current palate of sounds and tastes, so it is possible to get a very direct idea of

how we've changed over the years.

Finally, the new Age of Steam will also feature some beautiful new cover and booklet artwork by Jim Trainer. The original cover painting by Kev Thompson has been lost, so we've asked Jim to do some new artwork and he's turned in a magnificent set of images. 

More news on Age of Steam when we have a release date.    

Wild River

We are pleased to add Wild River, David Longdon's first solo album to the Big Big Train shop.

Wild River was recorded before David joined Big Big Train during a period of change (from one century to another). David Longon: "My old life was changing into an exciting/terrifying period in which I wondered what my new life would be like. The album is about the passing of time, love, death and the inevitable impermanence of everything. It is not a Prog album but it has elements of progressive rock within it. It's an eclectic mix and I had an interesting journey making it".

Wild River (2004) features many musicians collectively known as The Magic Club. The CD contains the guitar playing and Mellotron work of XTC's Dave Gregory.

BBT SSGB

Here is a photo from a recent BBT photoshoot on the glorious SS Great Britain in Bristol.

Left-to-right: Dave Gregory, Greg Spawton, Andy Poole, David Longdon.
Photo by Amy Mumford

The Golden Thread

Why is the band called Big Big Train? We still get asked that question, and the answers I've given over the years haven't always been consistent. In the early days, we were slightly embarrassed about admitting to showing too much of an interest in railways as we were frightened of being labelled as train-spotters, so we hid away from the obvious context. In more recent years, I've learned not to care.

The truth is, I like trains, dammit. I like railway stations and lines and all of the associated paraphernalia.

It's in the blood, you see. My grandad was a railway men and my mum was brought up in a railway cottage, a stone-throw from the line and a few paces from the engine sheds at Leicester yard, where her dad, a wheeltapper, spent all of his working life.

The picture below is of the yard (the Leicester Midland Locomotive Depot) and was taken just after the second world war. My mum lived in one of the terraced houses to the immediate left of the huge circular engine shed. She lived there for all of her childhood, only leaving in the late 1950's, when she got married.

Last weekend we took Mum back to the East Midland town of Leicester to revisit her past.

Whether you think large-scale immigration is a good or a bad thing or have no particular view on the subject, it is not a controversial point to observe that inward migration has brought major change to this part of Leicester which, in community terms, is now an area where madrassas, mosques and halal butchers have replaced the corner shops and churches familiar to my mum's generation.

The landscape has changed as well. Some of the terraces have been demolished (including my grandad's old house) and replaced by flats and industrial units, although enough of the old houses survive to get a feel for the area as it was. And many other things have also remained the same. The Royal Mail sorting office where one of my uncles worked is still a postal depot. Mum's girls' school has changed its name but not its function; the park she played in and walked across to get to the school is still there and still beautifully kept.

And down on the railway, whilst the engine sheds have gone, the sidings remain, although silent now; the rails are rusting and grass-grown and there are no engines any more.

Leicester yard in 2010, view taken from the bridge shown at the top of the previous picture. Mum's house would have been on the right of this picture, behind the trees

As we left the area, we stopped at a crossing for a little girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old. Her face lit up as she ran headlong across the road to the safety of the pavement. She may well have been on her way to play in the park. A half a century ago, that little girl could have been my mum.

Big Big Train is now a two blogs band

David Longdon has joined the blogosphere, so we are now a two blogs band. As well as BBT stuff, David will also be talking about his solo career and, like all good bloggers, will share his thoughts on life as he finds it.

You can read his blog here.

The success of Classic Prog

I was chatting to Classic Prog earlier today about our future plans 'n' stuff and I asked, with some trepidation, how well the mag was doing. It would seem that it is doing very well indeed.

Classic Prog is selling around 25,000 copies per issue now, which I think is bloody impressive for a specialist music magazine.

Long may it prosper.

Fat Billy Shouts Mine

We're hard at work on an EP for release later this year, prior to the completion of the next album, English Electric.

More news on the EP later, but in the meantime, here is an excerpt from one of the songs on the EP, Fat Billy Shouts Mine. It's a sad tale about a footballer called William 'Fatty' Foulke, a goalkeeper from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The excerpt isn't mixed or nuffink, so it's a bit rough and ready, but you'll get the general idea.

The fiery Moog Voyager solo is from Martin Orford.

Cover stars

There's a big interview with us in the new issue of German-language magazine Progressive Newsletter. Excerpts from the interview (in English) can be found here.

DPRP Poll

Another pleasing poll result in the Dutch Progressive Rock Pages poll. We came 7th in the best album category and 5th in the best individual track category with The Underfall Yard.

This is very pleasing news as we are one of the top independent bands outside of the major artists to feature in the best album poll (the major artists I'm talking about include Porcupine Tree, Transatlantic, IQ and Dream Theater. The 'independent' bands ahead of us are Riverside and Gazpacho. And, in fact, we are ahead of both of those in the best track category, only behind the four major artists previously mentioned.)

It's also worth remembering that our album only came out in December. If we'd released it a month or two earlier, I suspect we'd have done even better.

There are a number of other Big Big Train highlights in the poll. David came 6th in the best vocalist. For somebody whose voice is new to most of the prog audience, that is a brilliant and thoroughly well-deserved result. Dave Gregory came 10th in the best guitarist (he would have come 9th but somebody got confused and voted for me rather than Dave. Doh.) And Nick D'Virgilio came 5th in the best drummer category for his performances on The Underfall Yard.

Incidentally, The Underfall Yard is currently third in the best album of 2009 category on Progarchives. Voting for this poll remains open so the position does change from time to time, but we've been in the top 5 for quite some time now.

A Farewell to Bard

We're down to the last couple of boxes of the Bard CD and will shortly be saying goodbye to this release for ever, as, once the last copy is sold, it will be deleted and will not be reissued nor made available via iTunes.

Bard was our first album as an indie band and the first to come out of our own studio, so it was an important release for us at the time. But it's no longer representative of where we are or want to be and so it's time to say farewell.

This is not a moment quite in the order of Boromir's death scene in the Lord of the Rings, and certainly a long way short of Butch and Sundance's final dash into sepia-toned history. But it does make me feel a little nostalgic and so, tonight, I shall raise a glass to Bard.

iTunes Essentials: Modern Prog

On February 10th, iTunes released one of their essential compilation downloadable albums. This one rather pleasingly avoids any labels that I may have had a recent genre-based rant about, and is called simply: Modern Prog 

The album is structured into three sets of songs - 'The Basics', 'Next Steps' and 'Deep Cuts'. The complete album of all three sets consists of 75 songs, and will set you back 60 quid. 'The Basics' set of 25 songs from the album is 20 quid and features The Mars Volta, Radiohead, Opeth, Steven Wilson, The Pineapple Thief and many others. Big Big Train is also  featured on 'The Basics' set with 'Last Train' from Underfall.

There is quite a time lag in getting sales reports from iTunes so I haven't seen how The Underfall Yard is doing, but the fact that we have been selected for this release suggests that things are going pretty well.

Neo, retro, who gives a shit-o?

Lots of nice reviews about the album have appeared, which is very pleasing. However, I confess to being a little irritated by the common shorthand descriptives of 'neo-prog' and 'retro-prog' that have appeared in some of the reviews.

I do hate both of those terms. 'Neo' is normally used in a 'look-down-the-nose' kind of way. 'Retro' is less damning, but suggests that there is no sense that a band is trying to do anything original at all. And is it possible to be both 'neo' and 'retro' at the same time? Maybe it's the start of a new sub-genre: 'retro-neo'?

People do, of course, need to get an idea of what a band sounds like from album reviews, and I have to say I much prefer the direct comparisons to other bands. If someone says we sound a bit like Genesis if they'd returned to their 'progressive' roots in the 1980's, as Slartibartfast does in his Progarchives review, then I'm both pleased and flattered.

Interview with David in Classic Rock Presents Prog

Look out for an interview with David in the next issue of Classic Prog (available from next Wednesday.)

The editor of Classic Prog, Jerry Ewing, also reviews The Underfall Yard.

Does anybody have the original artwork for Goodbye to the Age of Steam?

We're just debating options for the remixed re-release of Goodbye to the Age of Steam and it is beginning to look like a CD release is viable rather than just a download-only version. However, we don't have the original painting for the cover. I know it's a long- shot, but I thought I'd ask whether anyone knows of its wherabouts?

It was painted by a chap called Kev Thompson and we know that he sold it onto somebody. Was it a prog fan who bought it (in which case we might be able to track it down) or was it somebody

who liked pictures of Cornish engine houses? (in which case we haven't got a chance.)

Can anybody help with this? (cue: tumbleweed in the comments)

Aural Moon Album of the Year

Results from the annual Aural Moon radio station poll:

1. Big Big Train - The Underfall Yard
2. IQ - Frequency
3. The Tangent - Down and Out in Paris and London
4. Steve Hackett - Out of the Tunnel's Mouth
5. Transatlantic - The Whirlwind
6. Porcupine Tree - The Incident
7. Riverside - Anno Domini High Definition
8. Agents Of Mercy - The Fading Ghosts Of Twilight
9. Unitopia - The Garden
10. Beardfish - Destined Solitaire
11. Phideaux - Number Seven
12. Touchstone - Wintercoast

The Underfall Yard on iTunes

Just a quick post to say that The Underfall yard is now available to buy from iTunes.

Happy New Year to you all.