Allan Holdsworth (Guitar Player 1980): Difference between revisions

TYPECASTING ENGLAND'S ALLAN Holdsworth as a jazz-rock soloist extraordinaire is easy for anyone who has heard his spellbinding and complex lines, which abound with wide-interval melodies, singing harmonies, and high-speed picking. But his electrifying solos on albums by Jean-Luc Ponty, Tony Williams Lifetime, Soft Machine, U.K., Bruford, and Gong have inspired players in several different styles, not just fusion. For example, in the April '80 issue of Guitar Player, Eddie van Halen described one of the things that makes Allan so appealing to him: "He's got a rock sound."

A native of Bradford, Yorkshire, Allan Holdsworth was born on August 6, 1948. Although his father was a skilled pianist, a love for the 88 keys never bloomed in young Allan. His early interest in music never went beyond listening to jazz records, and it wasn't until he was 16 that he even tried playing a guitar. At that time his father bought him an acoustic for about ten shillings. The instrument sat around for awhile until Allan's interest in playing was sparked by hearing the local guitarists play in the neighborhood pub. Soon thereafter he joined a band that covered pop songs, in which he played two guitar solos per song: "One was supposed to be an impersonation of the one on the record," he explains, "and the other was something of my own."

Holdsworth quickly tired of playing other guitarists' solos, and early in his musical development, he began to concentrate on defining a style of his own. In 1971 he moved to London and met up with drummer Jon Hiseman who was putting together a heavy-metal rock quartet called Tempest. After recording one album with that band called Tempest (out of print) for Bronze Records in 1972, he left the group because of a dispute with Hiseman over their musical direction. "I had envisioned it as something that would progress," Allan recalls, adding, "I believed that there was room for the music to grow, but Jon wanted it to go the other way."

Allan's first experience outside of rock and roll was with the jazz-rock aggregate Soft Machine. "It was really interesting," he says. "because I'd never played in odd time signatures before." After recording one album with them called Bundles, he left Soft Machine and through a series of encounters met drummer Tony Williams. Along with Williams, bassist Tony Newton and keyboardist Alan Pasqua, he recorded two albums - Believe It and Million Dollar Legs - and toured in 1975 and '76. After bad management drove him away from that ensemble (at one point during a tour he ended up stranded in San Francisco with neither money nor a place to stay and had to pawn his guitar to get back to England), Allan recorded his first solo album, Velvet Darkness. "That was the biggest mistake of my life," he rues. "We didn't have a chance to adequately rehearse the music, and we were given only nine hours in the studio," he explains, adding "many of the songs don't even have endings, so on the reco rd, they just sort of peter out!"

Over the next few years Holdsworth recorded on several albums, including drummer Bill Bruford's first solo LP Feels Good To Me, and Jean-Luc Ponty's Enigmatic Ocean. By this point touted primarily as a soloist, Holdsworth found himself trapped into a one-dimensional mode, feeling he had more to offer than just flashy embellishment to other people's songs.

Bill asked me if I would play on his album, Feels Good To Me. Afterwards, I started to really get sick of soloing. I couldn't stand it any longer, so I just killed myself with alcohol. When Bill asked me to work on his second album, One Of A Kind, I expected things to be different, especially since he had Jeff Berlin on bass. Jeff's a very good player.

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.

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.

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."

How did you get such a massive sound in your solos on "Hells Bells" [from One Of A Kind] and "In The Dead Of Night" [from U.K.].

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.

Early this year. It's called False Alarm, and it's a trio that we're now trying to get management for. We have Gary Husband on drums - he's also very good on piano - and Paul Carmichael on bass. Besides playing guitar, I also sing a little. We had a terrible time finding a bass player because so many of them are interested in sounding like Jaco [Pastorius]. We wanted someone who sounded like they were doing something of their own. Our music has some elements of jazz and rock, but we try not be overly tricky.