00:18always was a hard act to follow and I've always been aware of that. I think for all the guys in
00:24the band that's been the case. You know, whether you have individual hits or whatever, there's
00:29always that sort of, it's a bit like the mothership, isn't it? You know, when I write a song I think
00:35would this have passed muster with the other guys, you know, would Phil have liked it rhythmically,
00:40would Tony have liked it harmonically, would it have worked for Mike, would it have worked
00:45with Pete lyrically and, you know, you have all of that and but at the same time of course you want
00:52to do your own thing and, you know, I just thought, yeah, I've really got to push the envelope
00:59harmonically with this, you know, it's got to be as good as some of those things that I've listened
01:03to. It's got to be as good as Grieg, it's got to be as good as Tchaikovsky, you know, it's got to be
01:09as good as that first day when I worked with Phil in the rehearsal room with the band. He started
01:14playing me something, I said, sounds fantastic and he said, oh, that's Ringo Starr's drum solo off of,
01:21what's the one, Abbey Road and I always remembered that and I thought, you know, I want to do something
01:28like that, that's a little bit like Keith Moon, isn't it, you know, so it's got the bass drum going
01:32but it's like, it's like doing fills all around that so we had the Wolves at the beginning singing
01:38away and a frozen reverb note of that so they hit a seventh and then the drums come in and then it's
01:46band kicking in and the orchestra and choir and everything.
02:16Every time I've done an album I've always thought, well, I need to get orchestral perspectives
02:26in here but how do we enlarge everything and even if you've got a real orchestra on it or
02:31you've got, you know, several people tracked up, it's quite hard to not have the orchestra
02:39impoverished by the group because groups make a big noise but there's this area of
02:47marcato stuff where they're playing with the edge of the bow and reinforcing some of the
02:52bass things with brass so that it's not just the sort of, the kind of definition of bass end that
03:02when you get a great bass player with a really extraordinary sound like Chris Squire who's on
03:08the album, there's this thing that orchestras they have a more amorphous bass end, it's not
03:16dependent on great speakers and sharp definition, it's more than that. So I wanted to get that idea of
03:26infinite bass so we stacked up a lot of that, you know, we had more than one thing playing basses,
03:32you know, I mean I think on one track we had about, you know, 20 different things all doing bass.
03:40There's a lot of things on it that shouldn't really work, orchestras with rock groups shouldn't
03:45really work, you know, because they're not supposed to be as percussing and I wanted it to sound like an
03:50expanded rock band but not just an expanded rock band that sounded like it had an orchestra with it but also
03:56with world music instruments as well, so the Arabian ud, the didgeridoo, the deduk, the tar from Azerbaijan,
04:05all these various things that helped to expand it a bit, you know.
04:26Working with these other instruments that I'm not familiar with, working with Malik Mansirov,
04:35who plays the tar, the tar, small stringed instrument with sympathetic strings,
04:40same family of instruments as the guitar and the sitar, and Malik from Azerbaijan,
04:49where 50% of the people are still nomadic I believe, he's a little bit like, he's got the speed of
04:58John McLaughlin and in a way the mysticism of Ravi Shankar, he's incredible, and of course the other
05:07instruments that might be less familiar to people, the Arabian ud, I bought that in London,
05:12it's a fretless lute, I learned to play it a little bit, I'm not the level of virtuoso on it that Malik is on the tar,
05:22but I took some things from him, the idea of playing on one string, more things on one string than you would normally
05:32do in sliding and so on, dust and dreams that that kicks off, some of these world instruments, they often set the scene before the song starts,
05:45it's almost as if when Malik is playing on the beginning of Warflight you've got almost like the flickering flames of a kid,
05:51but it's almost as if when Malik is playing on the beginning of Warflight, you've got almost like the flickering flames of a kid,
06:01flames of a campfire, you know the kind of music that they might have played at one time when they just sat around to entertain themselves and I wanted to get an aspect of that,
06:11so a little bit like different relay teams, so you've got the world music musicians, you've got the aspect of folk songs, so you know at times I wanted to delve back as far as Peter Paul and Mary,
06:25I wanted to have that, but then I wanted to have rock as well, you know the edge of that and then whatever orchestra could do on top of that,
06:35it's my proudest moment to be honest, you know this album.
