Allan Holdsworth Interview
Here is the cleaned-up transcript from the Allan Holdsworth interview:
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- Narrator:** ...movement of the 70s playing with bands like Soft Machine and Gong, and people like Bill Bruford and Jean-Luc Ponty. He is still one of the most innovative guitar players in the world, but he remains relatively unknown except to a lot of guitar aficionados.
Allan Holdsworth recently has applied this astonishing technique of his to an instrument called the SynthAxe, which is a type of guitar synthesizer. But it's so expensive and complicated that you rarely see one performed live.
Now, the best way to show you Allan Holdsworth in performance is to go down to the Diamond Club and shoot him live. But the problem is that Allan's a very shy guy—a condition that was complicated by the fact that he heard that some of the Toronto guitar gods were coming down to the performance. So, he asked us only to shoot a soundcheck, which we did.
When we arrived at soundcheck, we were surprised to find that there was a whole crowd of people waiting to get in hours before the show.
- Fan 1:** You're lined up six hours early to see Allan Holdsworth?
- Fan 2:** He's the only guy in the world that's playing the way he is. He's the best! He's an Immaculate musician, an immaculate technician... I don't know where to go. First time I heard him, he just blew me away.
- Fan 3:** What is it about Allan Holdsworth that you're here to see him tonight? Well, it's- you know, it's Allan Holdsworth. The minute you hear his music... right? How many artists are like that? There's very few. If you wanted to play like him, you'd have to say, "Well, I want to take 10 years out of my life..."
- (Musical Performance Segment)*
- Interviewer:** Every article I read about you starts off with testimonials from people like Steve Vai, Carlos Santana, and Eddie Van Halen, all of whom say you're the best guitar player on the planet. I don't know—why is...
- Allan Holdsworth:** I'm not really involved in my own—you know, like the promotional aspects of it. I leave that up to other people. I think that sort of thing is being overused and it's really tired, and a lot of those things are old. I'd just rather sort of get rid of that kind of talk, really.
I don't like playing to guitar players, actually. I'd rather just play to—you know, like ordinary people. But obviously, it's difficult with this kind of music because you never get a chance... nobody ever really gets a chance to hear it, because radio won't play it. Because it's not jazz, it's not—they don't know what to call it, so they don't know where to put it.
So it's not, obviously, the music's not very commercial, and it'll never be totally acceptable by the general public. I would have never expected that, but I think that there's an awful lot of people out there that would like it if they had a chance to hear it. It's like the thing I always keep saying: if you've never tasted an orange, how do you know whether you like it or not?
- (Musical Performance Segment)*
- Interviewer:** If you were to describe your own music, would you say that you put together the best of what rock and roll has to offer and the best of, say, what jazz has to offer?
- Allan Holdsworth:** It's hard for me to say it's the best of anything, because that's not for me to say. But it's a combination of both types of music, because I use more of a rock kind of guitar sound, but I don't really play rock music. And all of the compositions that I write are vehicles for improvisation specifically, because that's what I'm most interested in. Vehicles for improvisation means that the music is jazz to me, because that's what the word jazz means.
- Interviewer:** Is it possible for someone who does as complicated a music as you do to just knock off a three-minute pop song and then sit back on the road for a while to buy you some time, or does it not work like that?
- Allan Holdsworth:** It doesn't work like that, because—no, I mean, you could do it theoretically, people have done it. But the problem is when you do that, then all of a sudden somebody starts playing it on the radio, and then you attract the wrong crowd because you've attracted the crowd to this kind of music, and then you present them with something else which they're not going to like. And there's something sort of fake about that, you know? I like to find a way to make what we're doing acceptable, rather than just doing something deliberately so that to reach people.
Like if there's not a lot of guys playing the SynthAxe, you know, for example, and it's a pretty bizarre-looking machine really—doesn't matter. But I was thinking, you know, in a pop context, or if you were on a major label or something like that, they'd probably play that to death, you know, the space machine or whatever. But you know, as far as the general public, they probably don't even know that an instrument like that exists.
- (Outro music)*
