Passion of the Prog: A Conversation with Pendragon's Nick Barrett

Story by Bill Kopp

Among the modern variants of progressive rock in England, Pendragon is a well-established brand. Their sound is built upon the approach of the classic prog acts, but with a decidedly modern spin. I recently spoke with leader Nick Barrett about the band’s new album, Passion.

Bill Kopp: In the “progumentary” DVD that is packaged with the new audio CD, you answer a few questions that indicate you’re a fan of — and influenced by — artists like Pink Floyd and Genesis, to name two. But Passion — to my ears anyway — sounds less “classicist” in its approach, less reliant on trying to evoke the sound and feel of older prog. Would you agree, and why or why not?

Nick Barrett: Well, yes. I would agree. My initial influences in this kind of area of music were Pink Floyd, Genesis and Camel. Really, those three. I was never really a big fan of ELP or of Yes, apart from a couple of albums. So I feel kind of frustrated when people talk about prog music very broadly, because there are all kinds of different types.

And that’s just one slice out of my musical influences. Initially I liked bands like T. Rex and Slade, then Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix. And then more recently, bands that you may have heard as more of an influential force on Passion, bands like Foo Fighters, Rammstein, or Deftones.

You know, there’s a lot of the nü-metal bands. About 2003, I thought that the progressive thing, in terms of the 80s style, had been done to death. And I was looking for something else. Not even so much the music, but the attitude. Bands like Radiohead; they were using Mellotrons, which were obviously used in the very early days of progressive rock. But they were doing it in a different way. And I thought, “There’s really something here I’m starting to like.”

And I thought, if we took fundamental influences (which is the Floyd, Genesis, Camel) and married the melody of that to some of these newer kind of approaches, maybe we could come up with something exciting. To be honest, it started with the album Pure, or even with the album Believe in 2005. But on the albums Pure and Passion, it really came home; I really felt like I found something exciting again in music, more than regurgitating – or trying to regurgitate – the sounds of music from the 70s. It seems so trite now; so contrived. There’s so many bands doing it, and I get the feeling they just don’t care any more. That’s the way I felt; I felt strongly about it.

BK: And even the seventies bands you’ve mentioned, they’re more what I would consider song-based. Even though the Floyd certainly had longer pieces, melody was always at the center. Same with Genesis; even though you’d have these great, long Tony Banks solos, the melodies would stick in your head. In a way some of ELP’s stuff could be like, “Look everybody, I can play the hell out of this.”

NB: Exactly what you said there, word for word, are what my feelings have been for the last thirty years! To me, Genesis were absolutely the band. They could do no wrong, pretty much all the way up to ABACAB. I liked them again on things like We Can’t Dance, but there was a different kind of magic. It was still very good, songs like “No Son of Mine,” or “Fading Lights.” I thought that one was just fantastic. I still had a soft spot for the Genesis thing. For me, it’s always all about the songs. So that’s where I’ve headed. Wen I hear riffs like [some of Genesis’ best work], there’s nobody else on the planet can come up with melodies like that. Compare that to the new crop of bands. If people could replicate that, I’d be mightily impressed.

But I’ve rarely, rarely seen it. I’m not going to mention any names, but there’s two bands I heard the other day that did this exact regurgitation of the eighties style, like Marillion. And the keyboard parts, they’re just not melodies. They’re aimless solos that don’t have any tune.

A lot of what I’m thinking came from last year’s High Voltage Festival. They had a prog stage, and I was actually fairly knocked aback by the lack of songs. That’s where I come from; that’s what I love. That’s what’s in my heart. I think stuff like “Carpet Crawlers” is one of the best melodies ever humanly written. I think it would be great if people were chasing after that rather than chasing after, “Hey, this is in 13/8 time signature.” To me, that’s so boring. It’s dated, and I’m not interested in it.

This is why I like bands like Porcupine Tree. They’re more emotional-based, more song-based. More atmospheric. Bands like that, and Opeth, among the modern clutch of bands, like Radiohead, are a million times more interesting than the “regurgitators.”

I wouldn’t mind the regurgitation so much if the songs were as good as the originals. But they’re not.

BK: On the DVD you show some of the genesis (no pun intended) of the album, and illustrate how it was built at least in part on computers, with ProTools etc. and doing things like adding drums on top of the instruments, as opposed to the old fashioned way of laying down rhythm tracks. What do you see as the advantages of this modern method? Do you think anything is lost by employing digital technology?

NB: Well, you always get something extra-special when you record something live. But you also lose something as well; it just depends where you’re trying to go. If I could actually imagine the Rolling Stones incorporating the method I’ve used for this album, it would be a disaster. The way that band comes over as being a world-class band is a lot due to their live sound, and their interaction in playing in a live fashion.

We’ve done some live recording before, and found, for example, “Er, the bass drum’s a bit out there.” Some bands would think, great. Because that incorporates part of their live sound. Take Radiohead: sometimes some of the playing is a bit wayward. I don’t mind it; it adds a tremendous amount of personality. I mean, if you want perfection, you might as well use everything programmed.

I’m not looking for perfection, but I am looking to structure melodies and songs that have atmosphere. And one way to do that is with ProTools. Start with a guitar riff or keyboard part, and build on that. Add some string and an organ, and so on. Replace it with some other sounds, maybe some samples, and try to build it that way. That’s how I write. The guitar parts might come first, and then I add keyboard things.

But to get an impression of what the song’s going to do, I always like to do demo drums. So the songs are completely written by the time they go to the band. And it’s a fairly focused way of working, because it means that the stuff is nearly finished when the band gets to replace parts, like the drums and the bass guitar.

It’s just the way that it works for us. Not doing it live, I suppose we lose something, but I think we make up for it by getting a certain tightness in our sound.

BK: I thought it was interesting when you — again I’m speaking of the DVD here — when you talked bout melody versus rhythm in terms of which you concentrate more upon. Before, I asked about the recording process, doing essentially the melodic parts first and the rhythmic parts later. So now I’m wondering if this method might in some ways allow you to sort of capture the essence of the song first. I’d never considered that before. What do you think?

NB: Yeah, it’s kind of taking a reverse approach to things. I did have some sort of Jethro Tull -esque guitar riffs, and I wasn’t quite sure how the drums were going to go. I put down some demo [drum parts], but when Scott came in and did the real drums, we spent three days going through approaching how we were going to do it in the studio. What cymbals to use; things like that. And that process, honestly, brought the drums to the music. It’s developed even more today, since we’ve toured.

I think drummers often find this. They say, “Oh, is that what you had in mind? I’d have done something different if I had known.” Doing it this way, it has time to develop. And then they’ve only got themselves to blame! [laughs] It’s been quite an interesting way of doing things as well.

BK: Did you find that as you took the songs out onstage that they changed at all?

NB: They pretty much stayed the same. To be honest, with new material, you’re always a bit worried it going to be not as good live, that it’s going to sound as confident, powerful, big. The odd thing was, when we played “Empathy” and “Green and Pleasant Land” and others, they sounded better than anything else in the set. The power of the songs really came out. I was pretty surprised at that; I felt like there was a kind of magic going on that I wasn’t expecting. But the format didn’t change from what we’d been rehearsing.

BK: I’m new to Pendragon’s music; Passion is the first of your albums that I’ve heard. How would you say your music has changed since back in the late 1970s?

NB: When we started out, there was a fairly naïve — dare I say immature – approach to writing. If you look at chord progressions, they were a little bit forced, in a way. Some people, if they listened to the songs, they wouldn’t recognize that. But the weird thing is – and Genesis might say this about their early albums as well – but to the listener, they’re just as good as the later stuff. Because they’ve still got a certain vibe that people absolutely love. Take a song like “Supper’s Ready.” Tony Banks could probably say, “Oh, we could have done something better on that part,” but that’s all people know.

So I kind of appreciate that, and I wouldn’t really run our early stuff down. It is what it is, and it was what it was at the time. But I think I’m happier now as a songwriter, as a lyricist, as an arranger. I think I create better things now than I did in the very early 80s, for example.

BK: Snapper is a label that’s increasingly known for creating very nice packaging for their artists’ music. In one sense it seems that there are people there who remain sort of steadfastly committed to the idea of the album , as opposed to a collection of songs. Is that consistent with your impression of the label?

NB: Yeah, absolutely. They kind of fit with what we were all about, which was about trying to create something that was more than just a record sleeve. They were very accommodating when it came to the booklet. It’s twenty pages! In previous times, we’d hear, “Ah, we can only stretch it to twelve pages because of the cost.” Record companies [often] don’t want to pay for this or that.

They didn’t mind about that at all. They wanted to do a really nice quality thing. And that’s a really good thing, because the kind of area we’re in, people want the physical, nice-looking end result. That’s something that goes with genre of music we’re in.

BK: Speaking of the artwork, I imagine others have pointed this out before, but the distinctive album artwork is very reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell. Is this a mere coincidence or did you purposely set out to evoke that artwork?

NB: It is a mere coincidence. I mean, I’m a fan of Pink Floyd, and I’m a fan of that album. But I’d pretty well forgotten about all this. Originally the concept was completely different. I saw this picture when we were on tour, and I thought, that wold make a great album cover. It was two faces facing each other – they were sort of Aztec-type faces – and their tongues were coming out, and they were sort of entwined. And I though that went so well with the title Passion. If you look at the back of the booklet, that is the original cover.

But it never really floated my boat; I remember thinking, “I’m not sure this is quite right; it’s not hitting me right between the eyes like it should. And the artist came back with something that was going to be inside the book. It had the sparks [between the faces]. And I said, “That’s it.” So originally the idea was a little farther away from the Floyd thing than what we had in the end. I never even thought of Pink Floyd when we were doing it.

BK: I don’t know that — for me – Passion is necessarily a concept album per se, but it’s certainly a record with thematically and sonically linked and related songs. When you develop and album like this one, do you eventually think of the songs as each part of a larger whole, or are they just, the last eight or nine songs you’ve finished?

NB: It’s part of a larger whole, definitely. As the album’s going along – as it’s starting to take shape – I start thinking, “What’s going to be a good thing to hear next?” It doesn’t always work, but with this one, we started off with three quite rocky tracks, because I wanted to make an impression quite early: an uptempo, powerful rock feel. And then we come in with “Green and Pleasant Land” on the fourth song, and it goes very calm. From that point on, the album becomes more atmospheric.

That was all very deliberately done, and we worked out how people would feel as the album unfolded. The song “It’s Just a Matter of Not Getting Caught” is the perfect thing after “Green and Pleasant Land,” which ends fairly raucously, with the guitar and drums doing fairly hefty workout.

BK: I’ve spoken to a number of British artists and many of them share the same challenge: they have fans in the USA, and they’d like to play for them live. They know if they do, they’ll probably sell more albums here. But getting to the USA — let alone mounting a tour here — is an expensive proposition. Is it something you consider?

NB: We consider it quite frequently. We have been over there, and played in RosFest a couple of times in Philadelphia. Or Gettysburg, is it. Obviously not everyone can come to that. And it would be great to play in other areas, like New York, and the west coast as well. And the Michigan area; we’ve got fans there. Even Florida.

But to actually do a tour per se to cover those areas is just impossible at our level. If we sold more albums, there would be more opportunity to do it. But I’m still always on the lookout for finding ways in. An old friend of mine from England lives in Arkansas, and he’s quite involved in annual bike shows. He was going to have us over to do that, and there was quite a lot of money in the pot to spend, so I thought, “Well, if he can get us over to do that, maybe we could tag on some other shows.”

So there’s always some kind of plan being formulated about how we could do more, but 99% of the time these things fall through and become impractical. It always gets put on the back burner.

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