I recently reviewed the Pendragon EP, North Star, and contacted Nick & Rachel Barrett to undertake an interview with the website.
As you can see below, the detail they have gone into is incredible - the thoughts of a master songwriter & performer alongside his wife keeping the wheels turning smoothly provide for a unique insight into one of the finest acts of British progressive music.
The images in this interview were provided by (colour) Pendragon and (black & white) Dave Lichtneker. All music samples are from the band’s official Bandcamp & YouTube sites. As with all music on this website, copyright remains with the artist, and readers are strongly encouraged to buy produce from the artist- help them to provide us with the music we love!
Thanks to both of you for agreeing to do this interview. We will concentrate first on new and recent work before doing some history.
Pendragon have returned in 2023 with brand new music, live shows, and sounding in rude health. You must be delighted!
Yes. Having a 3-year layoff made it incredibly tough to get the ball rolling again. We had to do a ridiculous amount of rehearsal to get back up to speed as we hadn’t all even been in the same room for 3 years but great to be back!
North Star is an EP release instead of a full-blown album. Did the Covid period play a part in a “curtailed” writing and recording process?
Well, yes, but not because of things necessarily directly related to COVID. I had some extremely challenging issues in my personal life that could’ve happened without COVID, it’s just the way the cards fell. People often don’t really consider that musicians and performers might have other problems in their lives, they just think we sit here all day just buzzing along plonking on guitars – they don’t think we’re thinking “shiiiiit…I can’t pay my electric bill, or the car’s broken down!”, or someone in the family is ill or someone close is suffering from some other problem, depression, or unemployment or whatever. If we don’t make an album, they just think we’re lazy, ha-ha!
Further to this, I have seen some chatter online recently that more frequent EP releases as opposed to the long player might be seen as the commercial future for bands such as Pendragon. I will be asking questions about streaming, online piracy & etc. later, but for now, do you agree with this observation?
Making a full album is a much bigger musical statement as far as I’m concerned so that is what I would prefer to do and would aim to do in future. There is no real advantage to making a tonne of mini albums, it just felt right at the time for us to make North Star. From a commercial income point of view, yes making more mini albums with less music and less work might seem attractive and the easy option but that’s not what I want to do. I want to make music with a musical statement that feels right at the time, I’m not even thinking about the income as a rule when I’m wearing that hat. Unless we get a bit desperate like we did after the last 3 years!
Before discussing the music, itself, North Star sees the return to the Pendragon fold of John Barnfield, a name from quite a way back – before the first album! Please tell my readers the story of Barney’s involvement with North Star.
Barney and I were working on an album together. He is one of the few people I can co-write with without us wanting to kill each other. Phoenician Skies was a song we were working on. I came up with the layout on 12 string guitar and I loved what he did with the keyboards on that song but I really felt Pendragon needed to do something by way of a new release, we haven’t worked for 3 years, so we were on our knees financially, I knew Phoenician Skies would fit in well with my other bits of music I had, it’s the same picking technique as A Boy And His Dog, so I told Barney I was going to have to nab the song back for Pendragon! He didn’t mind, he gets a credit on the playing and writing so, it ended up ok! We still want to do something together and have a pot of ideas kicking around that’ll probably turn into an album one day.
So, to the music. I think you sound better than ever, sonically, vocally, in pretty much every sense. There is a freshness to this and Love Over Fear. In my review, I remarked upon the move to Cornwall. A gorgeous part of the country, it must have had an impact upon your writing, especially picking up some deep folk sensibilities there?
Thank you very much! Yes, Cornwall seems to have had a strong overall effect on my life. Some fan said to me a few years ago, why don’t you stop all that surfing and get on with a new album? [the surfing is great down here]. My answer was that the surfing was the album. This is the kind of thing that inspires the music. Again, I don’t just sit down from 9am to 5pm starring at the walls “making music”. Music with any kind of meaning at all comes from a much, much deeper place. You have to find that place, it might be on a train, it might be out at sea, it might just be staring into oblivion – but it’s a lot better starring into oblivion in Cornwall than where I used to live in Swindon! Oddly enough I’ve always had a keenness for a lot of folk music particularly in the vocal harmonies. I suppose it depends on what you call “folk”, I would include Neil Young in that, not just that hey nonny nonny stuff!
The artwork by Liz Saddington is stunning. As I write these questions, I have North Star and the ridiculously lush triple CD package of Love Over Fear in front of me. Tell us a bit about her, please. I can see very little online trace of her, and I am sure that readers of this interview would like to know especially how they might purchase some of her works.
I saw her artwork in an arty type of shop in Boscastle and just knew it would be perfect for the concept I had in mind for Love Over Fear. What she did for Love Over Fear was incredible, she did a different style for each of the songs in the deluxe book thing. I mean just look at the work gone into the painting for Truth And Lies, it’s astonishing. This is what it’s all about to me! Making something really great and making an effort in this world of mediocrity and short cuts. Make lots of artwork for the albums, lots of different feels and vibes to go with the music. She has done a few other bits of artwork in the same vein which you can get from various shops around Cornwall but like most [real!] creative people, she isn’t very pushy with her work, but you have to learn to do that, or you cannot pay the bills! Liz comes round here now and again for cakes which my wife bakes and we have a really good laugh and it’s always so exciting working with her. She only lives down the road. You can get Liz’s stuff from www.lizsaddington.com
Rachel, you have again done the photography, and it complements the artwork extremely well. Hobby, or something a little more serious?
Yes, the photography is just a hobby really, it’s handy because Nick can say “grab your camera” at any given time rather than having to for the conditions and feeling to be right because the photographer has turned up for his appointed time.
One of my readers has exchanged a view with me that St. Catherine’s Hill from A Boy And His Dog, the first part of the North Star suite, might be the one overlooking Winchester, where King Alfred was based. I, in my review, felt it had to be Launceston. Put us out of our questing misery, please – which is it?
I spent a lot of time with my son over the last 3 years. He was living in Winchester so I would drive up there a lot and walk and bike around the area. So yes, this St. Catherine’s Hill is in Winchester, in fact a lot of the song is about that time and place. The more you read the lyrics, the more it becomes clear, brown trout- very much a River Itchen resident, the water meadows, this hallowed seat of England, it’s all there!
My take on this wonderful introduction is that it is an old-fashioned fable, in that it tells us a moral truth that there is so much more to life than riches. The child with his pockets full of coins, sticks & stones, seashells, sand, and animal bones is wealthy in the truest sense of the word, with a joy of life and simple possessions. I have often made lyrical misinterpretations, and, indeed, I do not feel that is altogether a bad thing because intelligent music means different things to different people (as opposed to the basic “boy meets girl and shags said girl” behind much corporate pop music). So! A longwinded way of an introduction to ask you for your lyrical meaning.
And in many ways, that’s why I don’t much like visual backdrop screens at a lot of gigs. My interpretation of those lyrics and other worldly feelings are slightly ruined by a visual aid to steer you! I mean everyone knows that Firth Of Fifth is about cricket on the green, tea and cucumber sandwiches, the cold British sea…and we don’t need a screen to tell us otherwise! So, yes, I agree with you, sometimes lyrics and concepts are best left alone. However… A Boy And His Dog is loosely about growing up and keeping hold of the magic we had as children. There is a time when we get to, nowadays mid-twenties, it used to be mid-teens but that has changed, where life makes us grow up, often very harshly. But then when you get to your fifties you realise you have actually retained all those magical images and memories. When he was about 8 years old, I used to empty out my son’s jeans pockets to go in the wash, they were always full of those things, coins, sticks & stones, seashells etc. It’s an incredibly innocent image and powerful memory for me.
In my review, I made special mention of Johanna Stroud’s vocal and violin contributions. She has previously worked with Solstice, and I think she adds a great deal to the overall band sound and vibe. What is the history behind her involvement with Pendragon?
We really needed a new backing singer after Zoe went but one who could also play some violin, very hard to find! I was looking for about 6 months and found nobody. I found backing singers and violinists but not someone who could do both. Then I thought ah! musicians who are in folky situations often sing and play violin, so I got in touch with Andy Glass from Solstice as I knew he had been involved in folk music camps and knew a lot of musicians. Johanna was working in Solstice for a while then came over to us. She’s only 24 but such a great talent and great attitude, the golden combo! She was really easy to work with and fast, she knows her stuff and the test was getting her to learn 4 and a half hours of music for the VIP weekends we did, which she, along with the amazing Sally Minnear did with great aplomb! With drafting people like Johanna in, it means there is always something new and a fresh spirit imbued into the music, which I really like.
As Dead As A Dodo I feel is a direct companion to the uplifting 360 Degrees from Love Over Fear. Both have a wee bit of Americana to them to these ears, and certainly raucous folk music. Tracks such as these make me loathe labels such as “neo-prog” because there is so much more to you than that. Fair?
I don’t really mind labels too much, it’s neither here nor there with me, I’m only really concerned with the music. I suppose it’s because over the years we’ve had so many comments like ‘it’s this music or that music’, I’ve become immune to it! I’ve been listening to some American country guitarists over the last 3 years and was amazed at what I found. All that fancy sweep picking that was the domain of the Herman Lis of the world was actually invented by some guitarists in the ‘50s! Players like Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, Carl Jackson, and Johnny Hiland really showed me some new techniques that I learned during lockdown and the last 3 years, eventually this stuff comes out in my own music which again means we have something new to bring to the table. It’s a never-ending journey, always learning new things that can help my writing and musical approach, it always makes it exciting and challenging.
I find myself singing to the brief vocals at the top of my voice with the picture in my mind of a shedload of people queueing up to listen to and vote for some of the worst demagogues of recent times. Is it as nakedly political as this?
Er…it isn’t political at all haha! There we go, the one’s-own-interpretation thing again! I always liked the humour of stuff like Genesis - Harrold The Barrel and Camel – Foxhill, Down on The Farm. As Dead As A Dodo was really just an amusing little irony for me. The concept came from a book my son gave me for Christmas called The Worst Journey In The World by Apsley Cherry Garrard about Scott’s fateful Antarctic trip, and it said something like “doo de dum [can’t remember who it referred to] thought he was doing well….. but then so did the dodo”.
Phoenician Skies. I think this is a stunning piece of music. Intense, emotional, with some incredible harmonies. A bit of background to this track would be great, including whether you planned or wrote the keyboard parts with Barney a long time ago?
It started as one of the new guitar picking styles, I had been working on which lent itself very well to the chord structure I had. It only came about around 2 years ago, I had almost all the song mapped out, verses, choruses, bridges, solos but no actual vocal melody at that point. I sent it to Barney, and he added the Fender Rhodes electric piano and some single line female vocal samples as well as other sounds and parts. I loved what he did with the Rhodes. We struggled with the keyboard solo, to get a good melody. In the end I just played the same [ish] melody he had done on the Rhodes but with a lead synth and 70’s style reverb and then put some Hammond organ stabs interacting with it which seemed to work. The vocals for the chorus [and verses!] just sort of came together and seemed very obvious once I had the keyboards done, it was one of those ‘gift from above’ moments! This then made the guitar solo melody pop out very easily – all from the Rhodes part Barney did in the first place.
The EP ends with Fall Away, which I know has quickly become a fan favourite. As much as I enjoy the keyboard parts on Phoenician Skies, Fall Away is, to me, a fine example of just how important Clive is to the sound of this band. Please tell my readers how you began working together back in the day.
I met Clive when I went to Upfield School in Stroud, we were about 4 years old, I sat next to him in class on my first day and apparently sneezed over him, and the rest is history. We actually went off to our different schools when we grew up and I didn’t seem him again for years till Pendragon started booking appointments to hawk our demo tapes around to record companies in London and we needed somewhere nearby to stay. I had just got back in touch with Clive after some years and he let us stay at his house, so we used to talk a lot about getting record deals and touring. In 1986 Rik Carter left and we were doing the usual rounds of hawking a new demo around record companies, a demo that just me and Peter played all the instruments on and recorded at Millstream Studio in Cheltenham. We were staying at Clive’s, and I said we needed a new keyboard player, he just said “I’ll do it”. Clive was a real breath of fresh air for us because he joined as a ‘session player’, not as a writer per se, sure he had ideas and suggestions but there was never that ‘political hot potato’ of having to use his ideas as he wasn’t a paid-up full-time member as such, even though today obviously he's as much part of the furniture of Pendragon as Peter and I! This is one reason why we have survived for so long, because of the lack of conflict over songwriting which is often the bane of most band’s careers. Clive and I also had an utterly fatalistic sense of humour which got us through some really heavy shit over the years. Musically this is the way we work well, I write all the keyboard parts, melodies etc and construct the music on Pro Tools and Clive’s role is predominantly in a live capacity and general integral part of the team.
A love song, where you are now, both landscape and life partner? When I hear this, I instantly think of where I live, a rural idyll, and the love of my life. Life is grand, is it not?
That’s a really good attitude to have! Count your blessings, right? Yes, I’ve been with Rachel over 20 years now and we still get on and like a lot of the same things. We’re both creative and that really works for us. The fridge might be like some hellish bomb site, but we still interest each other, we’ll wake up at 5am and be excited to jump in the van and drive down to the beach to see the full moon over the sea. Living is Cornwall is amazing, the sea just never gets old, we spend most of our time outside, that wasn’t so easy to do in Swindon. Even a dreary Tuesday morning here in Winter is amazing. Every morning I come down, light some candles, get the coffee on, play the guitar for a couple of hours and just stare outside at the sea. If it’s blowing a gale, and we face right onto the Atlantic so the weather is severe but there is something very cosy about being inside looking out at that. I like to be out there too. Walking in the rain is magical…sometimes.
I know this is a shockingly unfair question, but I am going to ask it anyway. What are the plans for the next recorded work?
Why unfair? It has been a while since a full-blown album so a fairly expected question. There never really is a ‘plan’. It just happens when the time is right. The only plan as such is to make the music as good as possible, sometimes that takes 3 years sometimes it takes 6. The bit people don’t understand is that they generally see us, 4 musicians who play music, on CD and on stage – that’s it! They don’t see that we have actual normal lives and troubles too. Our ‘rhythm’ of life is often different from a 9-5 type job and the troubles we have tend to follow ‘our’ rhythm of life, a lot of musicians have this, periods of time when everything is going swimmingly well and other times where life is riddled with challenges, and this can often affect your output. Like when I got divorced, it took me 5 years to make Not Of This World, not that I was working on it for a solid 5 years, but I was dealing with fundamental obstacles which got in the way of my ability to be freely creative for long periods of time.
I always have some music on the go and ideas are always there for new music and ideas but it’s like trying to dig for gold, sometimes you come across a nugget and other times you just get tons of mud!
But right now, I am sensing that familiar ‘calling’. Starting to come up with words, tunes which are trying to formulate themselves into something.
Regrettably, I could not make the live weekends you recently held – caring responsibilities prevent this at present, but the reports and reviews I have read speak of nothing other than a triumph. From your perspectives as organisers and lead member, how was it for you?
Amazing, from a ‘people together’ point of view - utterly amazing! From the music, the shows, the audience, these were some of my favourite shows we’ve ever played. I loved it.
From a logistics and financial point of view – a total nightmare. Everything since covid has rocketed up in price, especially things that affect touring like travel, accommodation, food, flights, petrol. Touring is now the luxury pastime of the rich! And the risk is monumental, if you think these were the only shows we have done over the last 4 years and the only opportunity to make an income, the precarious nature of touring is something only a madman would do, or very rich people. We had one ambulance call out for a suspected appendicitis, 11 cancelled flights, no hotels at 10.30pm at night at Heathrow airport, gear breakdowns, lighting rig not showing up, the dark forces really tried hard to stop us on this one!
But my band and crew were utterly amazing, amazing people with amazing abilities and when that came face to face with people who had followed us for the last 40 odd years, the magic happened. Real magic, real love.
What the public don’t often see is that 99% of the bands out there do this for a hobby they happily lose £40,000 on a handful of dates because it doesn’t matter, as long as they are getting popular, it’s an ego thing unfortunately.
Further to this, you have also just finished the last ever Mick Pointer’s Script Revisited tour. How did you become involved in this, and why has a decision been made to end this particular part of all your musical lives?
Mick came up to me at Riffs bar in Swindon in 2006 and asked if I wanted to do the guitar for this idea he had to do some Script shows. It was an easy gig! I didn’t have to organise all the musicians, rehearsals, transport, lights, and PA etc. The music was already accepted as classic so there wasn’t any trying to get new stuff over to an audience. All I had to do was play the guitar and that idea appealed to me a lot. Also playing with all the guys in Script gave me something different to what I was used to and it’s great to mix things up a bit sometimes with different people.
I think Mick felt that after the 40th Anniversary of Script shows maybe we should put it to bed, I don’t know why really because it still is one of those things you can bring out of the woodwork every so often and have a really great time, a lot of people love it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Grendel reared his ugly head again at some stage! Musicians seem to have a problem stopping what they do. Even though they tell themselves they’ve had enough of it, they still come back for more. Camel and Frank Sinatra spring to mind.
I would like to move onto Love Over Fear. Starfish and the Moon strikes me as being about as personal as it gets, a sumptuous ballad. I love the illustration of the starfish with the moon in its glory above the sea. Tell us about this, please.
No. It has its own interpretation. As Peter Gabriel said, ‘only a magic that a name would stain’. I recently heard someone trying to explain the lyrics of Windmills Of Your Mind, this guy was torturing it. Those lyrics are some of the most magical ever written and all the science in the world cannot explain them. Sometimes music/art is there to just be ‘felt’ not explained.
Further to this, I think that that track should be a mainstay on radio. These days it seems to me to be virtually impossible to get any commercial radio station to play anything approaching music such as this, and that condemns (if that is the right word) bands such as Pendragon to that dreaded phrase “cult act” in the media. Why do you think this is? Surely, there is a market out there for more casual listeners who might not wish to wade through Suppers Ready or 21st Century Schizoid Man, but might well take a great deal from this track and, indeed, the album as a whole?
Well yes but in many ways that is what makes it special, that not too many people are in on the secret! There’s magic in that and a unity that we have with our listeners that this is ‘ours’, anyone else can freely listen to it if they want but it takes effort to find new things that are not on mainstream radio. There probably is a market but sometimes music is for people to discover and other times it is there on every street corner for all to consume - a bit like fishing, yes you can go to Tesco’s and buy a seabass, that’s easy, but if you caught that seabass yourself you’re in a world of unimaginable delight but it takes effort and is not so easy to do.
On Truth & Lies, the closing instrumental passage has the four of you working together perfectly, and I sat up and took notice at the way Peter & Jan-Vincent worked together in the rhythm section. How did Jan-Vincent come to join, please?
Vinnie came through Craig Blundell. I think Craig felt he should find us somebody after he was offered the Steven Wilson gig. I remember he said I know this guy who is an absolute monster player who would fit Pendragon so well. Vinnie came along to our first rehearsal at Riff’s Bar in Swindon, and we were blown away by his playing but we were equally impressed by his attitude and ability to eat huge amounts of food!
Without wishing to make any Spinal Tap drummer gags, I will confine myself to saying you have had some mighty fine skin thumpers over the years. Your thoughts on each would be greatly appreciated.
Huh huh…that would be like asking me to describe my ex-girlfriends. Not really a good idea. What people don’t realise is that there is a far deeper psychological feeling than they might imagine. It’s like if someone says I preferred the band when Fudge was in it, to me that is like saying I preferred you when you were with your ex-wife, it’s incredibly difficult to get your head around and feel good about it. There is a reason why these drummers [for the most part] are no longer in Pendragon, and that reason is that it was a nightmare to work with them and be around them…just like my ex-wife, ha-ha!
Being in a band is an odd dynamic and is a very fragile balance between people. As I said before the public only see some people playing some music on a stage, it’s almost inconceivable that their view might be interrupted by the awkwardness of complex relationships and struggles. However, Pendragon have worked through all out ‘difficult characters’ and I truly love the guys in this band now, they are brilliant to be around and work with. We all feel that way now.
[to get the real nitty gritty of the band members and stuff that’s inappropriate it will all be in my book! Haha...]
My last trip to Cornwall was with my local Cask Ale Club. A real highlight was visiting The Blue Anchor, a madhouse in Helston and basically having a bloody loud singsong and boozy session with the locals. Great fun. 360 Degrees reminds me of it every time I hear it. All aboard the carpe diem and seizing that day. It is a rollocking folk song which has me dancing every time it is blasting out of the speakers. Tell us about its genesis, please.
I started writing it on a tour bus in Vienna, so not very Cornish, eh? I love stuff like this, it’s different to what people might expect from us which is a good thing sometimes. I wanted to do something that had that ‘stomp’ feel in the same way as Waterboys The Whole Of The Moon had, which is very infectious. 360 Degrees is actually an extremely complex arrangement, particularly in the vocals and keyboards department. It took me a long time to get it all worked out, but I think the end result as you say is very much a rollocking folk song.
Eternal Light. “Turn off that TV set and read a book instead”, I believe is a play on that old show, Why Don’t You? The simple joy of life without the histrionics of modern so-called culture. Your comments, please.
It wasn’t actually a take on Why Don’t you? That transpired by accident. It was really my viewpoint of the lack of the wish to become enlightened in life. For some reason people already know everything about everything. They saw it on telly, they read it in the papers. So, when you get into an argument with someone over stuff like politics and religion it usually descends into emotional hysteria [Roger Waters springs to mind]. The human race is not ready to say, that’s interesting I’ll go away and read up on that and get back to you in a couple of months. The ego is driving to be seen to be right, so emotions take over instead of considered responses.
Okay, that’s the up to date and recent done. I would like to go back to some Pendragon history, if nothing else to allow me and many of my readers to wallow in some nostalgia. Firstly, I remember Rachel that as “Prog Chick” on Prog Archives, you interviewed Nick at his then farm, and I believed that was where you had met and fallen in love, but elsewhere it has been said you met at Clive Nolan’s gaff. So, let us be extraordinarily nosy and ask you to tell us all in true tabloid fashion. The full Barrett love thing, please!
Ha, ok, well, when I was “prog-chick” on the PA Forum Nick, and I were already living together. So, if you want the story, here’s the shortened version. I first heard Pendragon in 1985 and believe me, for a 15 year old girl in the wilds of Norfolk (not exactly a hive of musical activity) I finally felt that I’d found “my tribe”. I snuck out of home to go to gigs in London until I was old enough to go to shows without parental approval and fake ID and saw tonnes of bands in those days at the Marquee Club, The Astoria, The Royal Standard all the London venues that had a good prog circuit. I even had them all autograph my “gig jeans”. At some point through mutual friends, I became friends with Clive and his partner Sian. I was invited by Clive to the big Millenium Eve party at Nick’s house and when midnight rolled around, I found Nick and snogged his face off! We became good friends after that, because we were both recently divorced and had kids of the same age, we had a lot in common. At some point in 2001 we became an item. After a few years of crossing the country backwards and forwards we moved in together in 2005, and once my trial period and apprenticeship was complete, we got married in 2020.
Nick, we are of a similar vintage. My introduction to prog was Going for the One by my cousin, and I remember sitting in the music room at school having deep and heavy (man) conversations about whether Roger Waters really was a fascist and why Genesis was dubbed the “heaviest band in the world” (copyright Nationwide) when they had, gasp, hit singles. What were your earliest musical influences, especially in the formative days of Zeus Pendragon, and I would also be interested to learn what floats the Barrett boat musically in 2023?
Dark Side Of The Moon, one guitar note! That’s how vast and how small the universe is. We think success is playing at Wembley Stadium, or that a 25-minute sprawling epic song must be better than a 3-minute wonder. But that note bend in the solo of Pink Floyd Time at 4.29 is simply from God. It changed everything for me. It still does it for me now, I’m in a world that words cannot describe. Then other stuff came from God!.......The guitar solo in Lunar Sea by Camel on Moonmadness, even now when I hear it, I am suddenly flying over the ocean on a moonlit night, the guitar in Ice sounded like someone was talking from the very deepest pit of their soul, I’d never experienced anything like that before. Steve Hackett’s solo on Firth Of Fifth, at 7.13, heartbreakingly crushing to the point it makes you long for something other worldly that can only be described as a spiritual yearning from another place [our real home maybe?]. The Hands Of The Priestess Part 2 at 52 seconds in, where that guitar melody comes in is so incredibly beautiful. Hackett’s guitar playing in Mad Man Moon, it’s never really on anyone’s favourites list but the melodies he plays behind Tony Banks’ piano touches my soul beyond belief.
So, for Prog stuff Camel, Genesis and Pink Floyd. But when I was about 10 or 11, I was into T. Rex, Slade and The Sweet, then Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin and still love all of those! In the early Zeus Pendragon days, we pretty much only did covers of the bands mentioned, Led Zep Stairway, Santana Samba Pa Ti, Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Chile, Fleetwood Mac Go Your Own Way, Bad Company I Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love, all that sort of thing.
What floats my boat in 2023? This – Eddie Holman’s live version of Hey There Lonely Girl at some theatre in Canada, this is probably the best and most soulful vocal performance I’ve ever heard. Johnny Wilder from Heatwave singing Always And Forever, again soulful vocals beyond being human. Kate Bush, Amongst Angels, along with that video from Michael Dudock de Wit just breaks me up, it’s so beautiful. Carl Jackson and Ashley Campbell’s version of Gentle On My Mind from Kinemaster Country Road. Carl Jackson unbelievable talent, I love this guy. Molly Tuttle’s version of Gentle On My Mind live from Music City Roots at the Factory, ridiculously good guitarist, and vocals. I just bought Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms and am loving that. Jack Johnson From Here To Now To You. Plus, still listening to a lot of old stuff from Camel, Jean Luc Ponty, Pat Metheny. I also like a lot of classical music, Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Chopin Nocturnes is some of my favourite stuff at the moment.
I have Kowtow from 1988, your sophomore effort, on as I write this. I think some of the reviews I am reading now preparing for this interview are rather unfair. Saved By You is a very good pop/rock song (not an insult on this website) which I recall was not on the original release and contains a passing nod to my wife’s favourites, The Sweet. I Walk the Rope is another pop infused track, with some lovely sax by Julian Siegel. Contrast that with The Haunting, an epic progressive track hinting at the wall of sound which was to follow in future works. I am curious, how does the Nick Barrett of 2023 think and feel musically when he looks back on the Barrett who was responsible for debut The Jewel and Kowtow?
Happy. I shouldn’t be because it’s traditional for musicians to trash their early output! But these albums were of their time and when I was remastering Fallen Dreams And Angels and The Jewel I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this music. I’ve always loved pop music and being a big fan of Michael Jackson, Sade, George Michael and a million other incredible pop songs like Drive by the Cars, David Bowie Starman, Paul McCartney My Love, Chi Lites Homely Girl, The Stylistics You Make Me Feel Brand New, Terry Jacks Seasons In The Sun and more recent stuff like Calvin Harris Feel, Ariana Grande – there is a ton of music here which sits just as well with me as Supper’s Ready and Tubular Bells. The Jewel and Kowtow meant a lot to a lot of people, most of our following got into Pendragon via The Jewel, our first album.
Pending the answer to the above(!), I do think that The World from 1991 was a leap forward. The epic Queen of Hearts and We’ll Go Hunting Deer especially remain huge live favourites. This was not the easiest time for English progressive rock bands. Fish had left Marillion, the love felt for Steve h now was quite some way off, and IQ & Pallas had their own difficulties. Pendragon returned with an unashamed prog rock album. What were you thinking of?
Yeah, funny that. It was a case of needs must. We were financially in terrible debt, not in a good place, I was renting a room, had a crap car, a horrendous bread round for a job and no girlfriend. We had just about made enough money on the CD releases of The Jewel and 9.15 to make a new album. So, I thought we’d have one last fling, make an album with some nice artwork, work with a producer we liked [Tony Taverner] and make an album of just music from what came out when I sat down to play the keyboards or guitar and that transpired into The World album, this was the biggest turning point in Pendragon’s career. We thought we’d just be able to pay off all the bills and get out of debt, but it set the world alight for us and we had one of the best periods ever throughout the 90’s. Following up with The Window Of Life then The Masquerade Overture, it was amazing. Many other prog bands were really struggling in the 90’s but for us it was great.
Taken with The Window of Life and The Masquerade Overture, released within five years of one another, this trio is rightly revered by longstanding fans. My understanding is that this was a successful commercial period for the band as well?
Yes. As we had never been able to get a major record deal like all our prog stable mates, like IQ, Pallas and Twelfth Night. I started Toff Records in 1987, so by the time The World came out we were selling all our own albums, the Masquerade went on to sell over 60,000 copies, and still sells now.
From this I managed to buy a house and get out of my 1 room rental, get out of debt, build the studio, it was a dream come true.
Talking of which, I would now like to talk about your views on the commercial viability of bands such as Pendragon and some of the newer acts which I lovingly feature on my website. The world of corporate streaming as exemplified by the likes of Spotify & Amazon seem to have taken over the world. I believe that these corporate streaming models have all but consigned the old P2P file-sharing sites to at least a terminal decline. However, for your tenner a month, you can access literally tens of millions of songs without further financial pain or adverts. Whilst these models have brought some legitimacy to the concept of consumers “getting something for (virtually) nothing”, they have, of course, done nothing for the poor old artist. Bandcamp strikes me as being more on the side of the artist receiving legitimate dues, but enough of my thoughts. I know that the whole digital music “revolution” is something you feel passionately about, so please do take as long as you wish to explain where you feel artists are now in terms of treatment and what the future holds.
Crikey, this is a big subject. One good thing is that P2P file sharing does seem to have waned and people are buying CDs with a bit more earnest again which is great. However, streaming platforms like Spotify are simply death for artists. You simply cannot live from just streaming your music - period. We licensed one album to Snapper music who have it available for streaming on Spotify. It’s a compilation just so that anyone looking for Pendragon will find something with a mixed selection of our songs. We were accounted to for six months’ worth of streaming revenue from Snapper, and the grand total we received was £5, total royalties. That is the long and short of it. Financially for artists it's an utter disaster. I have heard and I believe experienced a rumour that streaming companies employ people to go out and find any dissenting opinions that speak out against them and sabotage any threads on the internet, on Facebook, forums, Twitter etc by telling people that streaming does not harm your record sales and does not harm your business. Without sitting at my office desk looking at my accounts and bank statements, how could they even possibly know that! They don’t! It’s just propaganda to keep the lie going. When I recently railed against streaming, someone with a very ‘non prog fan sounding name’ did exactly that, telling people I was wrong, that it didn’t harm our record sales or business. He didn’t enlarge on his argument, he just stated this and then disappeared.
We’re very lucky that we have a hardcore following that will buy the special editions, and vinyl versions of new releases is also good, not vinyl of re-released stuff as about 50% of that stays on the shelf and sells very slowly but at least it helps a bit, and of course CDs are about 85% of our income, but the margins on those are pitifully small. If you’re a new band and don’t have a following who want to support the band in the ways I’ve mentioned and you rely on Spotify for income you will never make a living from music unless you have other sources of income to add in, which we are seeing more and more of now, either they do a You Tube channel, internet content, or have rich parents, girlfriend who pays the bills or another job. As I told you earlier about 99% of the bands you read about in Prog Magazine do not make their income from music, it’s all an illusion! New bands starting out don’t stand a chance unless they can find some other way.
Out of adversity comes genius. Not of this World is the “divorce album” and I still regard it as one of your best. I am curious. If the personal circumstances had not hit you, how do you think the band might have developed differently after The Masquerade Overture?
As we roll through life we are shaped by our experiences and the whole circumstances surrounding Not Of This World shaped my life and way of thinking. It is probably the first album we have done that I feel the lyrics had any powerful emotional content, before that I don’t think I understood so much of the feminine energy and I don’t mean women by that, I mean feminine energy, which we all have somewhere. It was a harsh but invaluable lesson. If I hadn’t had this experience, I think we would have carried on making less sensitive music, even Indigo was more emotionally open “I’ve been trapped for most of my life….” would’ve probably not been a lyric I would have used. So, another set of colours were open to me on the creative palette with and after NOTW. Without NOTW we probably would be playing Death Metal.
In my (relatively short) review of Believe, I described this as a stark change of direction, almost post-indie. I still regard Pure as being a fine album, with a heavier feel. These two albums, to me, represent a band who wanted to move along, progress, if you will pardon the pun, and stay relevant and modern. Please tell my readers of the way you were moving as a writer and performer with these works.
I felt we’d done the grandiose thing which I loved and still love on NOTW. But as part of the post-divorce situation, I also became more aggressive musically. My son and I were doing quite a bit of motocross around 2003 and watching quite a few motocross DVDs and I noticed that I was really getting into a lot of the accompanying music from bands like Trapt, A, Nickelback, Rammstein, Deftones and other nu metal. Yes, it was heavy but had really good melodies and this influenced me quite a lot. Again, it’s another set of colours on the palette for being creative with but of course it will always be the Pendragon sound in the end. My son, Max was also playing me a lot of the music he liked at the time as well, like this German reggae artist called Alborosie and rap artists like Devlin who wrote some amazing stuff like London City – you have no idea how much of an influence this song and Runaway actually had on Pendragon which shows on Love Over Fear. There is an interval Devlin uses in London City that became the backbone of the end keyboard solo in Truth And Lies, it’s just a musical interval that I would not have normally used, this is why it’s so important to listen to other kinds of music and other artists. Musicians can say they don’t get influenced by others, but they are lying. Everything we hear comes out in our own interpretation somewhere down the line.
Passion is my son’s favourite prog rock album. He loves it, and he is only 21, so you have a new generation of fans coming behind old farts such as I. I still rate the album as a personal favourite in a large collection, and I would like, please, to hear your thoughts on This Green and Pleasant Land. “I can honestly say we’ve pissed it up the wall” exemplifies what I have always interpreted as deep frustration on your part that a land of heroes & heroines has become a wee bit of a mess and distant from that which made it great. Nick Barrett on this extraordinary piece of music, please.
Well, yes. My thoughts and feelings have moved on quite a lot from there though. I am writing a second book about this so I cannot tell you in a few words why/how this new way of thinking for me has come about…I need a whole book to explain it save to say that things need to happen for a reason, and it wakes people up to becoming more enlightened, eventually. We’re usually emotionally invested in politics and religion and just cannot see any other way but ours. But I still think that Green And Pleasant Land has hopefully a motivational influence that will at the very least make people think about what previous generations gave up to give people their freedom today and I still feel strongly about how ex-service men are treated. Basically, This Green And Pleasant Land is railing against political correctness and for promoting freedom of speech but there are some things that we simply don’t understand so we default to a faux over-nurturing nature and to be offended on everyone else’s behalf which is mostly emotional hysteria and in turn has no love whatsoever and does not bring any light to the world – such is the subtlety of evil.
Talking of which, the acoustic version of the song from Twigs which came on the bonus CD of Men Who Climb Mountains is astounding, and, if anything, the anger comes across even more starkly than with the wall of sound in the original. That sounded like a fun night?
Yes, it was. Lots of booze and I think we ended up, although it didn’t get recorded, everyone dancing around to some other songs I played like Camel Never Let Go and Angels by Robbie Williams. It was fun to do some house gigs although quite a lot of work to rearrange the songs for acoustic and vocal only. I’d quite like to do some more though as songs from Love Over Fear lend themselves very well to acoustic versions.
In my review, I said that in two or three albums, we would regard Men Who Climb Mountains as important a change of direction as Believe was previously, and I think in 2023, I was about right and this is a (mighty fine) transitional album. Your thoughts?
Umm..I have no idea. I just try to make good music. I think it suffered a bit because of the artwork which people found a bit muddy! They tend to like the cheerier stuff. Believe also had a similar problem. I think artwork really psychologically affects people’s opinion on an album, almost without realising it. We also changed drummers while in the studio from Scott to Craig Blundell so that didn’t help the recording process on MWCM. Some bits were a real struggle to get the right mix, like the end of Explorers Of The Infinite which I felt didn’t really come together till we re-did it with Vinnie. It sounded amazing to me after that!
Page six, and over 2,200 words. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. To conclude, I think Pendragon are held in the highest possible esteem by so many lovers of great music. We also think there are some great moments ahead. How about you?
Wow, that’s very kind of you to say that – well eventually after 45 years something had to turn out well! Those gigs last May were another level, if that’s what is to come, I am very excited about the future. Having Johanna and Sal on backing vocals and Rog Patterson back with us, this time doing 12 string guitar [he used to tour manage and was guitar tech] was a real joy. I am still, if not more than before, excited by listening to, playing, writing, and performing music. I don’t know quite what has happened to have this ever expanding enthusiasm about it but I still love it and connecting with other people who love it too.
My grateful thanks to Nick & Rachel for a wonderful interview!