Stephen Roberts, whose book was the inspiration for ‘Atlantic Cable’, has interviewed Greg. You can read the interview below.
1. When ‘Grand Tour’ was released in 2019, you said that BBT activity for a few years would be built around the album. Of course that didn’t come to pass and now you have a new album. What does that mean for ‘Grand Tour’? It would be a great shame if some of those songs didn’t get their due with a live airing.
That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought of it like that. I guess we will be focusing more on the newest songs. Plus we will also want to play some deep cuts we haven’t performed before, so it may be that songs from Grand Tour do get put to one side when we play live in 2022. One of the strange things about being in the music business is that the listener is hearing songs on newly-released albums as if they are hot-off-the-press when, to the artist, they will often feel like back catalogue. Grand Tour was released in May 2019 but the songs would have been written maybe a year or so before release, so those songs are already three or more years old.
2. Your songs are clearly very carefully crafted, begun and developed at home with the other musicians in due course invited to add their parts. Tell us something about your working methods.
Unless you’re making music by jamming (which, I think, has the danger of sounding exciting just because it was made collaboratively and in the moment rather than because it has depth or quality) then the truth is that songwriting is, for the most part, a lonely, and sometimes obsessive business. So, I’ve been writing a song for the last few weeks and have been working on it incessantly, sometimes with a guitar in my hand, often mulling it over in my head. And that’s just the music and the melodies, I haven’t started thinking about the lyrics yet. There will be plenty of collaboration on that song when it comes to the performances by everyone else in the band, but I won’t hand it over to them as a demo until I have honed it. And that is the way it is for most of our material: someone grafts away and then sends the demo out for the others to work up their parts. After that, we head to recording studios to get the parts down. It is possible to get some great results in home studios, but we want our music to sound as beautiful as possible so we prefer to work in dedicated studios where the acoustic environment and recording gear is optimal.
3. And this time, when so much normal activity for most of us came to an end, how was the album recorded? A lot of studios were used – how often were any of the band together in the same room?
The plan was to record all our parts in the room together at Real World. Unfortunately, Nick and Rikard were unable to travel to England due to Covid restrictions so they had to work remotely in the US and Sweden. David and I still took the opportunity to work at Real World, though, and the brass band was also recorded there.
4. By the way, have any BBT songs ever emerged from a jam?
Not that I can remember, no. As Nick and Rikard live in different countries, we generally only get together when there is an explicit purpose (tour rehearsals, recording or filming promo films etc.) We don’t have the luxury of a lot of time to just hang out together and jam.
5. How many guitars do you own? What is your favourite?
I have five basses, three of them Rickenbackers. A long time ago I wrote a song called British Racing Green and a few years back Rickenbacker released a beautiful limited-edition bass in that colour, so I had to have one of those and that’s probably my favourite. Alongside the basses, I have five acoustic guitars, two 12-strings and three 6-strings. And I have four or five electric 6 and 12-string guitars. I am not a collector, but it is nice to have the right instrument to hand when writing.
6. The new album takes its title from a book of that name by the journalist Rob Cowen. The blurb states that he writes about ‘the common ground we share with the natural world, the past and each other.’ Anyone who knows anything about you – your degree in archaeology, your childhood rambles in Sutton Park & so on – knows that these are things that matter to you. This must surely be your book-of-books?
Rob’s book connected very deeply with me. The other books that have had a similar impact have been Meadowland by John Lewis Stempel and The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner. The latter has an extraordinary description of a boy on a sledge and it puts me right back in Sutton Park in the 70’s. It was much colder then, or that’s how I remember it.
7. How did the idea that this new album should take communication as its theme take shape as you all worked on the recordings?
The album title came first, pinched from Rob’s book. So, we knew we wanted to create a set of songs which would feature some themes relating to the title. From there, you start thinking what common ground is. Rob’s title was a play-on-words: the bit of edgeland at the centre of his book is both an ordinary place and a place where people meet. We drew more from the latter meaning, so wrote a set of songs where finding and making common ground between different people was the main theme. This can mean individuals coming together as partners (for example, the title track and Endnotes) and whole sets of different people being brought together (as on Atlantic Cable).
8. You use images of water often as a motif in your lyrics. In this new set of lyrics, you often refer to rivers, the sea, tides, being at the water’s edge etc. Why do you find this particular imagery appealing?
I live very close to the River Stour in Dorset. I walk by it most days. Over the years, the landscape and the imagery has crept into a lot of my writing. Rivers have been essential to the development of human societies so there is a lot of metaphorical language associated with them. This is all good for a songwriter.
9. When we were exchanging messages about the Atlantic cable of 1866 in early 2020, you immediately saw it as subject matter for a BBT song and said that you hoped inspiration would strike. So how did inspiration strike? Tell us about the writing of that particular song.
The subject matter was extremely attractive to me. I have written a lot of songs featuring the ‘ripping yarns’ that come about because of mankind’s harnessing of engineering and technology to further our potential. The Atlantic Cable featured all of those things, plus had a theme of communication so I knew it would be right for the new album. The first thing I did was to order some books, including yours. I read them and made some notes, and the narrative arc of the song started to take shape. I then spent some time working through some musical ideas which I store on my phone to see if any of them might fit the song. There was a fast piano riff I’d written as an idea which I thought would work as an instrumental introduction. Once I had the start, it began to flow quite nicely. I then deployed a theme from a track which actually didn’t make the album. This theme drew the whole piece together. When the song went to the other band members it went through further development so there was a fair bit of work involved in finishing it.
10. I know I am not alone in believing that this is one of the best songs you have ever written. It is undoubtedly the centre piece of the new album. How do you feel about it?
I am really pleased with it. There are some exciting moments and also some sections which hopefully the audience will want to sing along to. It’s quite a dramatic story and I think it will be interesting when we get to play it live as David will want to present the tale.
11. Where is the place you are describing in ‘Black with ink? Am I right in thinking that you are writing about a city of the ancient world?
The initial idea came from a visit to Birmingham Art Gallery and Museum during our 2019 tour. There was an exhibition on the history of the collection and there was a photo of bomb damage from the Second World War. It was as if knowledge itself was under threat from that bomb. We tend to think that mankind will always make progress, but that isn’t certain. There are many examples through history where mankind seemed to take a step backwards. After my visit to the art gallery, I read The Map of Knowledge by Violet Moller and The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey and I watched some Carl Sagan documentaries. These all pointed to centres of knowledge in historic times which had been destroyed so I had lots of examples to write about. In the end, the two that interested me most were the stories of the great Library of Alexandria and Houses of Wisdom in Baghdad so the song is mostly about those two places.
12. ‘Headwaters’: It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?
Rikard is really gifted at developing musical ideas. I could feel the second half of the album was coming together almost as a sequence of songs and it needed something at the start which drew the threads together. I mentioned it to Rikard and he came back with the lovely Headwaters.
13. How difficult is it to sequence a concept – or indeed any – album? The last song on this and other BBT albums seems to have been written with that in mind.
It’s like piecing together a puzzle. The best albums have a satisfying ebb and flow and you need to get the tracks in the right order to achieve that. For Common Ground, we were aware that some of the songs were different from much of the material on previous albums, and when we played around with the track listing it seemed to work that those were mainly in the early stages of the album, while the later stages featured a more typical BBT sound. In fact, some very strong songs didn’t make the album as they didn’t quite flow with the rest of the material. Hopefully, those songs will see the light of day at some stage.
14. When did you last listen to ‘Selling England By the Pound’ all the way through?
All the way through? Maybe not for a decade or longer. I don’t listen to other people’s music much these days. When I do, it’s probably just a song or two.
15. Your relationship with David Longdon is the axis around which BBT operates. Tell us about the nature of this relationship. When did you first encounter David?
I had a phone call one evening from our long-standing studio engineer, Rob Aubrey. He was in a state of some excitement. He had spent a few hours working with a chap he’d never come across before. That person was called David Longdon and he had been invited to sing a couple of tracks on a solo album by IQ’s then keyboard player, Martin Orford. In fact, Martin hadn’t come across David either, but David, who had retired from music some years before, wanted to give it another go. He had got hold of Martin’s phone number and left a message on his ansaphone about singing some songs for him. Martin took a chance, invited him down and Rob recorded the session. He was blown away by David and thought he would be a perfect fit for BBT. The thing is, I wasn’t really looking for a new singer for the band, but Rob was persistent and so I listened to the sessions he’d recorded and was similarly smitten with David’s voice. David and I spoke a lot on the telephone over several weeks to sound each other out. Eventually, he came down to record The Underfall Yard album. We became friends and colleagues and my life took a very different course.
16. BBT have been existence for a long time & many musicians have passed through its ranks. Do you have much contact with former members?
Andy Poole lives just up the road from me and I speak to him from time to time. We have been helping Sean Filkins get his excellent solo music onto vinyl and download services so I also speak to Sean a fair bit. Sean is a metal detectorist so we have a shared interest in history and archaeology. He has made some amazing finds. I don’t speak often to other former band members, but I don’t think there is any bad blood, it’s just that it was the music that brought us together and it was the music that made the common ground we shared.
17. All acts recognize the importance of building close ties with those who buy their albums & attend their gigs. What lay behind the idea of calling us passengers (& who came up with that term?) rather than fans?
Actually, I have no idea who coined the term! We have a very active Facebook forum and it seemed to emerge organically from that. Without them, we can’t make music, so we owe them everything.
18. Big Big Train are becoming increasingly like the Tangye Brothers’ pumps … working ceaselessly. Do you ever envisage a time when you’ll be able to recharge your batteries & take a year or two off? Or are you just workaholics? (You’ll like the analogy – Tangye hydraulic jacks launched the Great Eastern in 1858!)
It’s a band of songwriters, so, it’s in our blood, it’s what we do. But, your question hits upon an important point and that is that the music business does not allow for artists to disappear for long these days. In the 80’s, many bands would make an album every three to five years and tour around that schedule. It’s not possible to do that now because streaming has eroded the financial value of new music. This means we have to be active. I am not complaining, though as the 80’s and 90’s were the exception. In the decades before and after, bands had to work really hard. Musicians that feel the world owes them a living are thinking back to a halcyon age which existed briefly and which, in any case, served only a few bands and artists at the very top of the business.
Associate Professor Stephen Roberts is the author, amongst other books, of Webster & Horsfall & the Atlantic Cable (2020) and a patron of Big Big Train.