U.K.: Difference between revisions

Had things become better?

Not much. With Bill and '''U.K.''' the rehearsals had almost nothing to do with what ultimately went on the records. We just played bits and pieces of songs, and they would shake them up and record them. Then we had to try to reproduce those parts live. And I just don’t feel at home doing that. I’d ‘rather play something first, and then record it. Now, I’m not against overdubbing - it’s great. It’s nice to embellish things, but I think that the important things should go down on the tracks so that when you play the songs onstage, nine times out of ten they’ll sound better. With '''U.K.''', particularly, we had millions of overdubs, and then we had to try to decide who could play what parts live because one guy doesn’t have four hands, and so on. Again it comes back to the magical quality of interplay between band members.

How did '''U.K.''' form?

Bill said that he had an idea of working with [keyboardist] Eddie Johnson and [bassist] John Wetton. He asked me if I would like to go to a rehearsal and play. I agreed, and it looked promising. But the closer we came to recording, the more sterile the music sounded. Just before I left the band, I used to daydream an awful lot while we were playing all those bits onstage; you know, thinking about a nice pint of beer or something. I was easily distracted. And because I couldn’t associate all those bits - they didn’t form any kind of cohesive picture in my mind - I wouldn’t know if it was tune three or tune six or what.

Didn’t you feel that your declining interest would be detrimental to the group?

Well, some musicians are very efficient in that they can wade through things and not get upset. Unfortunately, I can’t do that. As soon as something like that starts to affect me, I lose all heart. And once I’ve lost the heart of it, I don’t even try anymore. It’s wrong; it’s a bad thing. But because I just couldn’t fight it, I left. I started complaining a lot and as a result, on Bill’s One Of A Kind I was able to play quite a few of the solos live. I really liked the solo at the end of "In Five G."

What kind of amps are you using now?

I had Marshalls all the way up through '''U.K.''' and with Bill Bruford. Since then, I’ve gotten two [Norlin] Lab Series amps and a British amp called a Hartley-Thompson. The trouble with the Marshalls was that they only gave a suitable sound for single-note solo stuff. They always distorted the chords; if I wanted to get a clean sound for chords, I had to push the amps too hard. I often ended up with a horrible square-wave, fuzzbox sound.