The Tangent bandleader Andy Tillison talked to Prog about go back and forth presentations, anti-Tangent sentiment, and the moderately unexpected artist he’d actually love to paintings with when the band launched their 12th studio album Songs From The Exhausting Shoulder in 2023…
Andy Tillison has had an intriguing and sundry skilled adventure. Even if he fell in love with modern rock at a tender age, his first bands have been new wave/pop acts and he owned and ran a studio in Leeds within the Nineteen Eighties, which changed into a magnet for anarchists and punks. Quickly he was once rubbing shoulders with seminal British thrash and hardcore bands similar to Civilised Society? and Carcass, in addition to setting up a long-lasting courting with anarcho-communists Chumbawumba.
Right through the Nineties, he fronted a band closely influenced by way of the ones studio studies referred to as Gold Frankincense & Disk Power – their debut album, The place Do We Draw The Line?, was once the primary unlock on Peaceville Information, later house to Opeth and Anathema – then launched a sequence of neo-prog/art-rock albums underneath the banner of Parallel Or 90 Levels (aka Po90).
Then again, it’s his paintings with The Tangent for which he’s unquestionably best possible identified. Thru this band and related tasks, Tillison has come to paintings with many main names in recent prog. Some twenty years since The Tangent made their debut with an unabashed homage to English modern rock, The Tune That Died On my own, as a one-off expanded solo undertaking, Andy Tillison sits in his studio in inner most Yorkshire surrounded by way of a plethora of keyboards, microphones and esoteric outboard equipment discussing the band’s newest unlock.
“We’ve made 12 studio albums now, which is the identical in Sure phrases of attaining Large Generator. It’s now not cosmically necessary however I think a undeniable sense of delight – are we nonetheless right here?” he asks with a real air of incredulity. “We nonetheless have a document corporate who imagine in us and put our track in the market for us.”
Described by way of Tillison as “the tough twelfth album”, Songs From The Exhausting Shoulder comprises simply 4 tracks (with the added bonus of a canopy of UK’s In The Lifeless Of Night time). 3 of them clock in at over 17 mins and expand thematic ideas that he’s been toying with for years.
“It’s constructed on an concept courting again to the anarcho-punk band, Gold Frankincense
& Disk Power. I used the picture of the arduous shoulder as a spot the place individuals who weren’t doing in addition to everyone else watched the remainder of the sector cross by way of. If truth be told, that band’s 2d album was once subtitled A Fractured View From The Exhausting Shoulder.
“Musically, the point of interest was once all about composition; to head deep into writing advanced, super-organised musical adventures. A large number of classical codecs were adopted right here: musical tactics like recapitulation, subject matters, variation, and improvisation to make an album this is necessarily a sequence of reports or trips that I need to take other people on.”
The Tangent have a protracted historical past of songs constructed on tales and narratives, whether or not it’’s the recollections of an ex-International Struggle Two fighter pilot in In Earnest from 2006’s A Position In The Queue or the extra private and literal adventure described in Jinxed In Jersey from 2020’s Auto Reconnaissance. The Adjustments, from the present album, makes use of small vignettes from The Tangent on excursion to identical impact. Written all over the United Kingdom’s first lockdown, it captures a singular set of studies and feelings.
As Tillison explains, “It was once a length of our lives that can more than likely by no means come once more. It was once so quiet, so alien… I feel everyone was once at the arduous shoulder. We weren’t looking at the site visitors within the speedy lane considering: why can’t I be with them? We have been all simply damaged down by way of the roadside. I made up our minds that I sought after to say the band within the tune as buddies, now not as fellow musicians essentially. What I used to be lacking wasn’t the level, the motion, all that stuff; it was once the daft moments – looking for a lodge or the evening when bandmember X was once completely outrageously under the influence of alcohol and we needed to rescue him from one thing horrible. The trivialities of being at the street that actually piss you off however you glance again and smile about them. The tune is going on to incorporate soccer supporters, plumbers; everyone seeking to care for this. You probably have songs as difficult as that lyrically, except you’re a genius like Brian Wilson, you’ll be able to’t say it in 3 mins – you want time to take other people on that adventure. All of us like looking at a just right go back and forth display, like Michael Palin doing Pole To Pole or Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on their motorbikes [on Long Way Round], that’s what The Tangent does: we make musical trips. We’re the Alan Whicker of prog!” he exclaims with fun.
Instrumentals have turn into an ordinary function on The Tangent’s albums, a facet persisted right here with the sprawling The GPS Vultures, which permits the band to stretch out somewhat with some shocking solo paintings from Luke Machin and Theo Travis.
“Again on our 3rd album, A Position In The Queue we had a tune referred to as GPS Tradition – somewhat of a favorite for Tangent fanatics – what we’ve performed is get a hold of the speculation of classical diversifications, like Elgar and Paganini. It’s now not the similar tune in any respect, it’s now not a ‘section two’ or anything else, it’s simply any other piece of track utilising tactics and chord shapes that I used to make GPS Tradition. There are leitmotifs that tie it in combination, however it’s a separate piece. I’ve by no means been to track college, I will’t learn track and feature spent a very long time operating with individuals who use very difficult phrases that I don’t actually know the that means of! I’ve been studying from those other people through the years and my composition has advanced. There are a large number of influences: I’m an overly large fan of an difficult to understand Swedish keyboard participant referred to as Bo Hansson, who made 3 actually wonderful albums within the Nineteen Seventies and not were given the credit score he deserved and I used a large number of inspiration from him.”
Taking positions on social and political problems is a part of The Tangent’s DNA. The Woman Tied To The Lamp Submit offers with the long-lasting downside of homelessness juxtaposed towards human beings’ talent to invent and resolve in such a lot of different spaces. “It’s according to a real match that took place in 2013 or thereabouts,” Tillison explains. “We had a school team of workers Christmas birthday party. Making my approach to the bus prevent afterwards, I just about tripped over this deficient girl actually tying herself to a lamp put up. If she didn’t tie herself up she would fall over whilst she slept and she or he didn’t need to sleep together with her head at the concrete. I spoke together with her, gave her some cigarettes and discovered that simply weeks earlier than she’d had a lifestyles and a task: it will were me. It was once extraordinarily unhappy.” He sighs and pauses for a second, “however I didn’t do anything – I were given the bus and went house, as it was once overdue and it was once the center of wintry weather in the course of Leeds. The collection of issues that human beings can resolve is incredible, so why are there nonetheless other people with out puts to sleep or one thing to consume in the course of those wealthy towns? I every so often assume that I’m an overly naïve individual, so much my songs are filled with naïveté, however principally it’s simply me considering out loud: smartly why don’t we do this? The entire artful, grown-up other people have had a cross, give the naïve other people an opportunity!”
Whilst now not by myself within the prog global in voicing doubtlessly contentious positions, does Tillison fear about adverse backlash from being so slightly outspoken every so often? “Yeah I do, naturally I do. There are ‘Hate The Tangent’ threads in the market on the web, there are other people in sure spaces east of Austria who don’t essentially like probably the most issues we do. I simply really feel now and again it’s a must to take the danger. I’ve made no secret that I actually assume Brexit was once a horrible mistake, as an example, and I wrote a tune about it. [A Few Steps Down The Wrong Road from The Slow Rust Of Forgotten Machinery]. The ironic factor is, after it was once launched, I believed: the place’s everyone else? The place are my punk buddies? And there’s simply bloody me status right here with a prog rock band making a song about Brexit feeling very uncovered,” he says with faux-indignation.
“I am getting grief from a few of our personal fanatics, as a result of we’ve got fanatics of all political persuasions, however all I’m actually doing is making an attempt to pose a sequence of questions. I don’t need to slag other people off – there’s an excessive amount of of that on the planet – however I’m nonetheless going to sing about homelessness and poverty and racism as a result of they fear me. The pandemic and a woman tied to a lamp put up in an internal town are miserable, however if you wish to create one thing uplifting you want the triumph of a adventure during the darkish against the sunshine.”
Wasted Soul – the shortest observe at the album – suggests a northern soul/Motown affect, or is Prog studying an excessive amount of into it? “When I used to be in class everyone was once into Showaddywaddy and the Rubettes, and there was once only one unmarried black lad – I used to be already into my prog and I ran into him and he had an album with a Roger Dean duvet… and it was once Osibisa! That man single-handedly offered me to Earth Wind & Hearth, the Temptations, the 4 Tops and all these things. I simply love that track, it’s a part of the soundtrack of my lifestyles and the similar with disco. I imply I like prog, however the chances are your first kiss or sexual awakening is not going to have took place to Yours Is No Shame, it’ll be in the course of Warmth Wave or Boogie Nights!” he laughs. “I spent ages on Wasted Soul to check out to get it good – perhaps longer than on any of the opposite tracks at the album. Listening again it’s more than likely were given extra Commitments and Dexys Nighttime Runners to it, however I’m proud of it. Additionally, with the entirety else at the album, it’s a bit of slice of ‘good day, let’s birthday party’ so as to add somewhat of sunshine.”
Dialog turns to influences and there’s an overly lengthy listing – he’s as comfy speaking about Trent Reznor and Stockhausen as he’s referencing The Aphex Dual and Squarepusher – the latter impressing Tillison a great deal. He talks about musical and cultural melting pots and the significance of lyrics, which ends up in Neal Morse – “I actually, actually like his lyrics and that he fucking believes what he sings,” he enthuses. “I’m a professed atheist, however I’d like to paintings with Neal as a result of I feel it might be actually attention-grabbing to look what a wholly, amazingly Christian man like him and a non-religious man like me may do in combination. I feel we would possibly in finding one thing just right that can if truth be told save the sector,” he shrugs, “however I’m now not certain he is aware of who I’m…”
