I have a love hate relationship with the term ‘A musician’s musician’ as, to me, it seems to imply either of two things. Firstly that they make music that is somehow too clever for the general public, making something that is either inaccessible, self-indulgent or pretentious. However I can also appreciate that it can mean that someone is talented beyond words, with other musicians admiring their skill and output but they have yet to capture the public zeitgeist and sell albums in the volumes that less talented people do.
Nick Fletcher is definitely in the latter category. When it comes to guitar playing he is both talented beyond suitable superlatives but also, with albums ranging from Prog to classical, a man of eclectic tastes and skills. With his latest album A Longing For Home being released this month he is giving people yet another example of just how enjoyable his music is.
On behalf of The Progressive Aspect and myself, thank you for your time today.
Darren: Please tell us more about the new album, A Longing For Home? What can listeners expect from it?
Nick: The last album that I made was conceived as the second part of a trilogy of albums. All are conceived as a whole, in that each album has a different theme, but each one takes a different aspect of a combination of the relationship between science, religion and spirituality. So the new album is the last of the three. The first was called The Cloud Of Unknowing, the previous one, released last year, was called Quadrivium, and now A Longing For Home. Each album explores aspects of those themes.
Darren: What should they expect from this album?
Nick: It’s different. Although each of these three albums were conceived as a whole, they’re all actually quite different in, and of, themselves. The first of the three, The Cloud of Unknowing is quite a heavy and quite dark sounding album, while the new album, I would say, is a bit more optimistic.
I’ve created a new band for this album. I’ve got the same drummer who I used on the previous album, Anika Niles. She used to play with Jeff Beck and she’s one of the greatest drummers around today. She came on board for the last album and wanted to play on this album too, which was great. But, for this album I also changed some of the personnel from the previous albums. In that I got a new bass player, Jonathan Ihlenfeld Cuniado, who’s actually the bass player in Annika’s band, and when he offered to play on this album, I thought that was a great idea because they’re such a perfect rhythm section. It would be silly not to take up him up on that offer, because there such great players and they know each other’s playing so well and I thought they’d just be right for this.
Then I got a different keyboard player. As my old friend Dave Bainbridge was busy I decided that I wanted to work with this Norwegian keyboard player who I’ve heard of for many years, and always admired his work, called Jan Gunnar Hoff. He’s a fantastic musician from the north of Norway and he was really interested in contributing to the album. So he came on as well.
Also on board was my old friend Caroline Bonnett, who I always work with because she’s basically my, sort of, right hand producer, sound engineer and she’s a very good keyboard player too. She is an invaluable part of any team that I like to put together when I’m making albums. She has such an amazing ear that the albums always sound really good with her in charge.
There’s one particular track that I needed some very specific kind of vocal and the only person that I could think of was my friend Dikajee Olga Kopova, who I met last year. I got in touch with her and she said she’d be very interested in contributing. And she did the final track of the album and it’s a fantastic vocal performance that she’s given, perfect for the song.
I’ve also got a bit of classical guitar on this album, which I’ve never introduced before. I’ve always kept my classical guitar work separate from the electric guitar stuff. I would say that it is very much a band album, although I’ve written all the music and there’s lots and lots of guitar playing in it, it’s a very cohesive band sounding album. It is very spontaneous and very live sounding, which is exactly what I wanted.
Darren: Obviously it’s your product and your baby, but were there any tracks that took unexpected directions and surprised you once other people joined in the process? Did Olga add things that you weren’t expecting to hear in her contribution?
Nick: I think track five was probably the most unexpected track of the album, and it’s a little different from some of the tracks I’ve ever recorded before and the way that it came together. Originally I conceived it as a bit of a piano feature for Jan to play. But because of time constraints, he was busy with other projects, he couldn’t manage to do the extra track, so I had to have a rethink as to how to make that track work, so we ended up with a slightly longer guitar solo in the middle, which is, unfortunate but it still works. It’s a guitar album, so I can take a liberty. And then there’s a lovely fretless bass solo that comes in, which works perfectly with the track, so it worked out great, but it wasn’t quite how I expected it to be when I first conceived writing it. Also the percussion, that we used, was slightly different from what I imagined as well. I got it very clearly written, but it did evolve and it did change.
Darren: When young, who were your musical inspirations and who influenced you to want to pick up a guitar and play it?
Nick: It goes without saying that the first person I ever heard playing electric guitar was Hank Marvin. And now, at my age, I’ve even got the glasses. 🙂
Darren: Can you do the dance?
Nick: I can try, maybe at the next concert.
Hank really turned people onto the electric guitar and what it could sound like. So he was a big influence in making me think, oh, I really fancy playing the electric guitar, he definitely got me started. But it wasn’t soon after that, probably in late 60’s or early 1970’s that I heard Jimmy Page and I think that he really did it for me. I heard Zeppelin II and his guitar playing and it was, well, this is mind blowing. It was then that I thought I wanted to do that. Listening to him play the electric guitar in that way and in that style, so full of passion and spontaneity and excitement, he just made the guitar come alive in a way I’d never heard.
Darren: I could imagine you doing a duet with Jimmy. That would be an interesting sound.
Nick: It would be interested an sound, yeah. I can but wish.
Darren: Despite having released varied styles of music on albums, are there any genres that you’d love to try, even if it’s just for fun and might never get recorded or released?
Nick: Well, I have dabbled in most styles of guitar music over the years. Back in the mid to late 80s and all the way through the 90s and early 2000s, I was a session guitar player so I got to play all sorts, until studio work dried up because of the onset of technology and everyone could record at home.
I love jazz guitar, but I’ve never been a jazz guitarist. I tried it when I was younger, but I never felt that I was steeped in it. It wasn’t in the blood, I could never think fast enough. I think you’ve got to think incredibly fast to be a jazz player and I was always, like, two bars behind the rest of them.
And, of course, when you play the classical guitar, it’s a very different expression altogether, which, along with electric guitar, I love. Also flamenco guitar is something I admire and love a lot, but that’s the one area that I’ve never really ventured into.
Darren: You’ve released several albums, under various names, with John Hackett. How did that collaboration come about?
Nick: It’s interesting because I was working on an album with Dave Bainbridge in 2006 and we were nearing the end of the project and Dave said to me “Do, you know, John Hackett, Steve’s brother?”. And I said yeah, I know of John and of his work, obviously going back to days of Voyage of the Acolyte, so I knew John’s playing very well. He then told me that he also lived in Sheffield and he gave me his phone number so that I could call him. But I didn’t ring him as I didn’t have the courage to ring him and say, “Hello, I’m Nick. I play the guitar. How about it?”
After that I didn’t think any more about it, but then, as I was promoting an album that I’d made with Dave I was doing a solo concert in Sheffield Cathedral. And, at the end of the concert, this guy came up to me and he said, “Oh, I really loved your playing, it was fantastic. Have you got an album I can buy?” Which I had. So he asked if I could you sign it for me. Then I signed it and he then said, “by the way, I’m John Hackett.” Then, later, he called me and said “I really want to improve my guitar playing. Do you do lessons?” I did, so he asked me round to give him some classical guitar lessons and he was very good.
Then he said suggested that we form a duet and do some flute and guitar music. There’s lots of repertoire for it in the classical world, so we did. It’s been, it’s been a really good relationships. And then John decided he wanted to put a band together. Well, actually, he didn’t want to put a band together. He wanted to do a launch concert for his album called Another Life, and he didn’t want to do it on his own as he felt a bit exposed. It was then that he asked if I played electric guitar so I told him that I dabbled, a bit.
He then got out an old guitar, I played along to one of his songs and when I stopped he looked at me and said, “well, that’s more than dabble! I didn’t know you could play electric guitar like that”. I explained to him that I’d done it for a long time, because I played in a band for 25 years. He then said “Well, why don’t you come and do it with me?” So we did the launch concert together and then he decided it’d be great if we get a band together and do concerts. And that’s how it started, the John Hackett Band developed out of that. And then we’ve been doing it ever since.
Darren: Have you any advice to anyone who might be thinking of picking up a guitar and want to become a full time musician?
Nick: If I’ve got some advice for picking up the guitar, I’d encourage anybody to do it because it’s such a great thing to do. But, as regards making a living out of it, I don’t know if I’ve got any. It’s probably never going to happen. I’m at the age where I am able to do what I do now and enjoy it without having to worry too much about making masses of money out of it.
Darren: Today’s music has changed, hasn’t it? It’s pretty much all electronic synthesizers and computer programmes and they don’t really need any musical skills, guitar techniques or anything like that, they just program it.
Nick: Yeah. there’s an awful lot of that and AI is going to make it even worse. I won’t say what I’d like to say, but I’m not terribly impressed.
Darren: Touring and performing can have as its ups and downs, it can be tiring and mean long days and nights on the road. Are there any memorable experiences that always make you smile or laugh or that have stuck in your mind?
Nick: Breaking down on the M1 in the middle of the night and going to sleep in a layby. That kind of thing sticks in your mind. Then you wake up in the morning and find yourself getting into breakdown truck and falling out the back of it. That was the one I experienced.
Darren: You fell out of the back of breakdown truck?
Nick: I was asleep, then woke up and didn’t realize it was so high up. I just walked out and it’s like there’s this huge drop. But, on the whole, touring with the band is fairly sedate in some respects, so they’re not throwing any TV’s out the window. We’re not doing anything like that.
Darren: Over the years, how do you feel that audiences have changed? Do you feel the appetite for live music is as strong as it used to be?
Nick: I think it is within the progressive rock scene. I definitely think that there’s still appetite for it. Obviously COVID killed it off for a while, like it killed everything off, didn’t it? But I think that it’s come back now. I think we are back to where we were. I think there’s still a lot of people who do like to go out and experience live music; people of my generation or a bit younger. But it can also vary from one place to another.
I also think that one of the problems we always have is, and I think most bands do as well, is getting people to pre book tickets. If you get people to pre book, that’s great, but a lot of people like just see what it’s like on the night then decide to go out. When that happens promoters get very twitchy because they think, “Hang on a minute, we’ve hardly sold any tickets. What we gonna do? Are they gonna turn up on the night or aren’t they?” It’s a difficult call for the promoters that one. So we do like to always encourage people to try and buy tickets in advance as much as we can. So that at least the promoter has got a good idea of things.
There’s been many occasions when we might not have sold many tickets, and the promoter asks if we still want to do it. Our experience has always been to turn up and if there aren’t many people to play to, well, so be it. But we’re happy to do it because from our experience people will turn up on the night. Our philosophy is that if somebody is taking the time out to be bothered to turn up and listen, then we can take the time out and be bothered to play and it doesn’t matter if it’s 10 or 100 people, it doesn’t matter, we still feel that that whoever’s turned up to listen deserves a proper gig to listen to. Some artists can get all Diva about it. With “Oh, I couldn’t possibly play to such a small number of people!” You do get some people like that, but not us.
Darren: You’re professionals and you enjoy playing your music, filling each concert with so much fresh energy and that comes across well. It’s always felt by the audience.
Nick: Thank you, we try to give it our all, every night!
Darren: That is all we have time for so, on behalf of The Progressive Aspects and myself, thank you for your time.
[A review of Nick Fletcher’s classical guitar concert can found HERE]
