Metal Fatigue (album): Difference between revisions

==[[Allan Holdsworth (Guitarist 1985)]]==

What are you doing at the moment?

Well, we’ve got a new album coming out soon in the States, called ‘'''Metal Fatigue'''’, on the Enigma label. I understand it’s going to be released over here, unlike the last one, Road Games’, which was on Warner Brothers, but I don’t know which label it will be on. Warner Brothers took an awful tong time to decide whether they wanted us to do another album or not, which is why this one’s taken such a long time to come out. The majority of the recording was actually done quite a while ago, and there are two different sets of personnel. On side one it was Chad Wackerman on drums, Jimmy Johnson on bass, Paul Williams on vocals and myself on guitar. On side two Gary Husband, (an original member of the IOU band) played drums, Gary Willis was on bass and Alan Pasqua played some keyboards. The first line up is the one we’re touring with at the moment, and we’re just off to Japan. Hopefully, we’re going back to the States to record the next album, which I’m really hoping will feature the SynthAxe.

WHEN WE WERE recording '''Metal Fatigue''' [Enigma, 72002-1], a friend let me try his Roland synth. It was interesting because you could get some different sounds, but it was hopeless, as far as I was concerned, because everything else that you had ever learned about the guitar went out the window. It’s like the instrument was playing you, instead of the other way around, and I hate that kind of situation. However, I got kind of stoked up about synthesis anyway.

Cymbiosis: Well, your new album, Atavachron, because of the SynthAxe, has a distinctly different sound from '''Metal Fatigue''', the one prior.

It was a guaranteed two album deal. We only did one album and Ted wanted us off the label, so they sacked us off the label. But fortunately, because the contract was good, they had to pay me to get rid of me, so I took the money and put it towards ‘'''Metal Fatigue'''’ which put us at a point where we could license the album instead of going to a label and signing away everything. Otherwise you never see any money from it at all.

Despite the success of Road Games, Holdsworth’s recording career lurched into a holding pattern, his projected two LP deal circling endlessly with no place to land. "I didn’t record for a while after that," he explained. "Warner Brothers couldn’t decide what they wanted to do. When. I went in with album ideas, I was met with a lot of opposition because of the problems that they saw in ‘Road Games.’ Finally, they gave us some money to do a demo of the material that I was proposing for the next album. But when they heard the demo, they refused to let me make another album. It was not exactly a wonderful experience.

AH: Oh sure! I enjoyed that record. Actually that was a funny thing because the Road Games thing wasn’t going very well and I was signed to Warner Brothers and they were trying to get me to do a bunch of stuff I didn’t want to do. They never told me before they signed me, but after the fact, because the way that the contract was written, they had to, in order to get rid of me, they had to give me the opportunity to make another demo so that they could refuse it, so they knew that they were going to refuse it, but the contract stated they had to pay for the demos the demo was '''Metal Fatigue''', and they turned it down.

[[Category:Solo albums]]