Ch-ch-ch-changes
As, for the umpteenth time, I listen to James Dean Bradfield’s peerless solo album The Great Western, I find myself again at that previously mentioned musical crossroads. My other half Nicci and I had a second significant conversation last weekend about our respective artistic and personal futures, one that confirmed my notion that the days of me recording complex pieces, or world music influenced epics, are indeed over.
From 1992 to 2017 I piloted Mooch through innumerable changes of direction, including a lot of complex rock and space/progressive music. The seventeen-minute track Autumnal Equinox from The Pagan Year took me well over two years to complete and used almost eighty separate recording tracks, making it the most complex piece I ever attempted. I rate that one as pretty much the best thing Mooch ever did though. Other songs may not have been quite so dense, but they were often crafted from many intricate fragments. I wouldn’t say (as some have) that I am a perfectionist, but I do aim for the absolute best in recording quality, and that is often fiddly, tricky, headache-inducing work. So as I spoke about my musical past to Nicci, I wondered if – though Mooch has no legacy to speak of except in the minds of a handful of fans – I should now consider those days as set in stone, never to be repeated. Untouchable, in fact. My oft-repeated mantra of never re-treading old ground stands firm. I shrug my shoulders and move on.
It's been great fun celebrating those days with annual small scale releases, and very enjoyable to mark anniversaries with special releases as for Return To Starhenge, but if there will be no more seventeen-minute prog rock epics and no more hour-long world music excursions, what is left?
Though there is no legacy, I do have a huge collection of songs that began appearing around the days of Dr Silbury’s Liquid Brainstem Band and 1967½. It was around then that I began to try songwriting with melody. Those songs are effectively invisible, though – and it is them that I find myself looking over as I ponder a new, simpler, smaller-scale musical future. There are a lot of melodies there. 1967½, “1966”, 1968a, Stations Of The Sun, Sunshine, A Psychedelic Farwell, and then other albums too like Winter Madrigals, Songs Of Long Ago, I Am Luna – Songs, etc. Autumnal Equinox itself has a song at its conclusion called Sun & Storm, which I would like to re-record in simpler mode. That song came to me in its entirety just after I woke up on the Saturday morning in 2009 when I was about to begin work completing the equinox piece; a most peculiar and memorable experience. I also have a couple of dozen songs as yet incomplete or not begun.
Maybe it’s time to record these songs with an acoustic guitar in a forest. I do have one of those nearby: Mortimer Forest. I have a MacBook and an audio interface which, with a microphone and a few other bits and pieces, fits into a single bag. As my good friend Paul Rowley said in one of his Anvil Theory songs: Simplify your life. Let’s have some tea.