Igginbottom: Difference between revisions
From Allan Holdsworth Information Center
| Line 25: | Line 25: | ||
[On Nucleus:] "It was a good band - we were all really great players. In the band at the time we had Dave McRae and Gordon, sometimes even two piano players." Had this then been the first meeting with Gordon Beck, who Holdsworth was to form such a creative relationship with in later years? "No, I actually met Gordon a little before that when I was with '''Igginbottom''', because when we were trying to get that '''Igginbottom''' thing going we played at Ronnie Scott’s." | [On Nucleus:] "It was a good band - we were all really great players. In the band at the time we had Dave McRae and Gordon, sometimes even two piano players." Had this then been the first meeting with Gordon Beck, who Holdsworth was to form such a creative relationship with in later years? "No, I actually met Gordon a little before that when I was with '''Igginbottom''', because when we were trying to get that '''Igginbottom''' thing going we played at Ronnie Scott’s." | ||
==Allan Holdsworth (NPS Radio transcript)== | |||
PH: But musically if I remember in the 60s, you had the beginnings of the Beat-dom [Note: This word is most likely a reference to the emergence of Beat music, British beat, or Merseybeat] and the local bands which were playing the hits of the day rather than your own stuff, and you were with a band called Igginbottom that played - basically you were more into Coltrane than the Beatles or the Stones. | |||
AH: Yeah well that’s true, but I also before that, haha, I still did play with a lot of local bands in that town, Jimmy Judge and the Jurymen, they’re all like funny names, haha, Margie and the Sundowners, all these people, it’s great, I’ll have to ask them what they’re all doing. But that was more like playing in working men’s clubs and just doing the cover tunes, and then Igginbottom was really just an experiment and the unfortunate thing is that it actually got recorded when it never should have been, haha, because it was too soon, too early to be doing any recording really. It didn’t deserve it to be recording then. | |||
PH: It’s quite amazing to think that a band that played experimental stuff would be signed by a Decca label, Deram records wasn’t it? | |||
AH: Yeah, well that came about because of the other guitar player. There were 2 guitar players in the band, Steve Robinson and myself, and what we used to try to do - which was a very good idea, it’s just that we weren’t very good at it… but it was a good idea and we played like polychords, and I’d play 4 notes, and he would play 4 different notes and every chord was usually like an 8-note chord, which was unusual for the guitar, and we’d work on it. Some of the ideas were pretty good, it’s just that we couldn’t play, haha, but, uh, I forget where I was going with ya… | |||
PH: But how did you get a record deal… | |||
AH: Yeah, well, Steve Robinson was friendly with a guy, it was actually the singer in a pop band at the time called A Love Affair, Mick Jackson. Mick Jackson heard us playing and he thought he liked it so he - I don’t know how or why we ever got the opportunity to do this - but he dragged us down to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. Ronnie’s had the main club and the upstairs, so we set up upstairs and we played, and all the guys who were working at Ronnie Scott’s, including Ronnie himself when he was still very much alive in those days - we played and then they disappeared, and we thought, ‘uh oh, we’re out of here, this is it’, but when we came downstairs we realized that they actually really liked it, so it was pretty interesting. But unfortunately we were dealing in a time where like, if we were using any type of distorted guitar sound, the recording studios didn’t really know what that was yet. So if I tried to go into the studio and play loud - in other words, it was loud to get the distorted guitar sound - they’d say, ‘No, no, you’re doing that all wrong – YOU turn it down, WE turn it up in the control room’, we’d go, ‘no, that’s not how it works, we play loud, you turn it DOWN in the control room’, and it was a constant struggle, it was just a major disaster. | |||
PH: Was that recorded in London? | |||
AH: Yeah, it was actually recorded at Abbey Road! | |||
(Igginbottom excerpt) | |||
AH: It was really funny…we did a couple of demos, the same band, that turned out really good, because we did one at Matthias Robinson Studio and he was the guy actually who designed the Matt Amps - which became popular or later became known as Orange amps - and he had a recording studio at his house and we played loud - and obviously it was right, but, haha, it should have never have been recorded really. It was - we were not anywhere near ready to have that happen to us. | |||
==[[The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever (Guitar Player 2008)]]== | ==[[The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever (Guitar Player 2008)]]== | ||
