Bill Bruford: Difference between revisions

I’d like to go back to U.K. for a moment. Why was the experience so miserable?

It had a lot of potential. The band was originally Eddie Jobson, '''Bill''' [Bruford], and John Wetton without myself. They were looking for a guitarist and I had just started playing with '''Bill''' to work on his album Feels Good To Me. And he said "There’s this guitar player playing on my album, wanna check him out?" So, they had me over and thought this might work and said "Let’s give it a go." And we formed the band and came up with the name. I got on really good with all of them, but what went wrong is that everyone wanted to do something else. I think there were two factions in the band: '''Bill''' and myself and Eddie and John. And they were kind of at war really. So, that’s what made it miserable—they wanted me to play the same solos every night and it was a completely alien thing for me. I would have probably been able to adapt to that now, but what I wanted to do then was so opposite to that. Whereas now, I could have maybe said "Well I know what I want to do, but this is what this is." I enjoyed making the album, and that was great, but it got to be not too much fun on the road. It was purely a musical question. I don’t know, maybe the other guys in the band hate me, but it wasn’t that for me—it was just the musical thing. It was "Geez, what am I doing here?" It wasn’t that I didn’t like the people. I did—I really liked all of those guys, even though they probably don’t realize that! [laughs] It was purely and simply a musical problem.

CH: Now, there was a project that was proposed recently with '''Bill''' Bruford, but I guess that fell through somehow. But the question remains: Could you get something out of collaborating with '''Bill''' Bruford at some time in the future?

AH: Oh... possibly. I mean it just seems unlikely...

CH: But nothing in the immediate horizon? It’s too difficult from a geographic standpoint?

AH: It’s extremely unlikely, because simply he’s on one side of the ocean, I’m on the other. You know... there’s just the expense of doing an album. With two guys like that, you know, where... with two guys in England, two guys in the States, and they work for months on the music. It’s not like with... a different kind of music, but it’s more improvised, where you can show the guys the tunes through one way or another. And they can learn them... you... you’re talking about months of like getting it together, and... the only way you can do that is actually to be like a group and work together-you can’t just do that without it being real expensive. So if a record company was doing it...