Clive Nolan is not only the keyboard player for Arena and Pendragon. He also writes musicals and works on very different projects. With his solo album "Song Of The Wildlands" and "Dark Fables", another collaboration with Oliver Wakeman, the Viking fan now has two new releases on the go. eclipsed met him for a Skype interview.
eclipsed: Where does your affinity for musicals actually come from?
Clive Nolan: My parents owned a lot of LPs, which I always put on. There were a lot of musicals on them, so I guess it's in my blood. Later my parents also took me to the theatre. I liked to be drawn into the worlds that were sung about there
eclipsed: Your new album is called "Song Of The Wildlands" ..
Nolan:... and it is not a musical. It's a concept album! I would call it a secular oratorio
eclipsed: But it certainly contains "musical clichés", doesn't it?
January is definitely not a month for water sports in England. A perfect time for hobby surfer Nick Barrett to promote the new Pendragon album "Love Over Fear". It took about six years to complete, and it represents a new turnaround in the band's history: away from the somewhat harder pace taken in 2005, back towards neo-prog.
eclipsed: Your new album is finished. How does it feel?
Nick Barrett: It's the very rare case where you think: Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to do! I am really very happy with the album. It was also a lot of fun to record it. It was much less stressful than usual. Maybe that's because I've been living in Cornwall for a while now, not far from the sea.
eclipsed: What took you so long?
Neoprog experienced its heyday in the middle of the eighties. The reference works of the genre, which resumed the melodic prog of the seventies and poured into a new, more modern (with some bands also: more kitschy) form, originate from this time. Some few acts like Pallas or Marillion grabbed Majordeals, the latter even filled the big halls. But this high didn't last long: Only ten years later the MTV stars were Oasis, Spice Girls and Jamiroquai, on the radio they played "Killing Me Softly" by the Fugees and Alanis Morissettes "Ironic". Prog and Neoprog were considered to be extremely uncool in the rock scene of the nineties and initially lived a wallflower existence again.
When they founded in 1995, Progressive Rock was slowly on the rise again and was no longer dismissed as obscene. In the meantime, the English formation Arena looks back on a twenty-year history. The bombastrockers celebrate this with a new album. The second with singer Paul Manzi. Looking back on their own career, the Arena bosses Clive Nolan and Mick Pointer also ponder the unsteady line-up of their band.
SUPERTRAMP - 40 years "Crime Of The Century"
Actually they were already dead. Even dead as a doornail. After two albums that sold as well as soap-flavoured chocolate and, according to guitarist/singer Roger Hodgson, didn't sound much better, the chapter Supertramp seemed to be over in 1971 - because everything really went wrong. The band, which at that time consisted of Kevin Currie, Frank Farrell, Dave Winthrop, Rick Davies and Hodgson, fell apart after a disastrous Scandinavian tour.
AC/DC - Temporary power outage
Although Pendragon are among the co-founders of Neoprog, in recent years they have endeavoured to refresh their music with more modern elements. "Men Who Climb Mountains", the first album with drummer Craig Blundell, is no exception.
Pendragon belong since the middle of the eighties to the inventory of the neoprog scene. The formation, founded in 1978 as Zeus Pendragon, has presented itself stylistically broader and more modern with the albums "Believe", "Pure" and last but not least "Passion" in the last few years and has thus re-established itself as a relevant band. Guitarist, keyboarder and singer Nick Barrett, keyboarder Clive Nolan, bassist Peter Gee and the new drummer Craig Bundell record some of this freshness on "Men Who Climb Mountains", but at the same time they remind us more of earlier albums.
eclipsed: Nick, you are known to be a big Camel fan and as such especially love Andrew Latimer's guitar playing. Are there any songs or passages on the new album that you were buzzing around in the back of your mind while writing or recording Camel?
DEEP PURPLE
milestones in hard rock history
With Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath they formed the troika of British 70s hard rock. The cult band Deep Purple, founded 40 years ago, had to struggle with personnel problems right from the start: musicians came and went. On the occasion of their anniversary and as an appetizer for the upcoming tour, we take a close look at the different line-ups (Marks) - with the emphasis on the great time.
YES
Game without Borders Part II
