Pendragon’s Nick Barret takes his time. After talking to a lot of fans and posing with them for fanpics I sit next to him together with some ‘liquid friends’. Nick laughs: “When I’m 65 it’s nice to look back and think about all these nice people I met around the world. I don’t want to miss that!” Sure, Nick has a point there. He’s also a hard working man. He’s done a lot of things the last few years. He toured with Neo and Mick Pointer, and present he’s taking Pendragon’s new album ‘Pure’ on the road. All organized by himself, of course. Is he really the hardest working man in progbusisness?
[nick]: “Is that a statement or a question? Yes, I’m exhausted and tired! Ha!Ha!Ha! The reason why I do a lot of things is that I’ve got an incredible drive. I want to find out what makes people think or what make things work. But also what make things not work. I run a record label, I write the lyrics and music for all Pendragon-songs. That’s a lot of work”. “The difficulty comes when doing a tour parallel on recording an album. This time we changed the way we work because of legal downloading. We brought the new album ‘Pure’ out at the same time we went on tour. The album did incredibly well and the reactions were fantastic. It plugged us back in! Now a second European tour is coming and we’re playing at a Fish-convention in the UK. You get this hunger when things are not going very well, and you want to survive”. The process of legal downloading is a killer for many artists. I.Q.’s keyboarder Martin Orford stopped fighting the downloading process, and went on retirement. But that didn’t encouraged Nick. He thought of a very clever solution.
[nick]: “The last few years I said to Clive Nolan there’s got to be a way to make this work. What usually happened was when you bring out an album you sent all your promo-copies. A couple of days later people were downloading the album from internet. And still there was a month before its release! You won’t sell many copies then. What we did was selling the new album through our website, or only during the tour. We took it straight to the fans. That was an incredible success, and gave us the financial opportunity to carry on and making albums”. It would be a lot easier to sell your label to a major like EMI or Warner Music. They’ll arrange all promotional stuff and tours. All you have to do is make a couple of good albums. Nick doesn’t agree with that.
[nick]: “You can’t always make a good album. You make the best album you can make at that time. In all the albums we make we put 100% our best. Whether the public perceived that as a great album you find that out after 6 months, or a year after its release. That’s very weird. I also think that record companies can’t do much for bands. Especially nowadays. The whole musical industry is turning upside down. Bands don’t need major labels anymore. If they can do it on their own, they’ll do it. Record companies always tell what you should do. I never had that, and I don’t want it”.
The ‘Pure’-album says goodbye to the classic fairy-tale progsound from albums like ‘The Masquerade Overture’ or ‘The Window Of Life’. It has some powerful dark and melancholic parts which the fans never heard before. Nick wanted to be ‘progressive’ again. Are all his musical desires achieved, as far as possible?
[nick]: “I heard this band before anyone in the progscene heard them. I was in Lanzarotte for a holiday where I met someone from Sony/BMG. They just signed a band called Pure Reason Revolution, and he gave me their debut album. He said: “Tell me what you think of it”. I listened to it and I was very impressed. It sounded extremely good. There were bits of Queen, Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, and Ozric Tentacles. Very good and atmospheric songs. It’s a modern kind of rock, and that’s the area where I wanted to take Pendragon”.
In compare to his colleagues Nick hasn’t got a specific way in compose or arranging music. He doesn’t sit on a special sofa, or needs to be surrounded by spiritual environment.
[nick]: “No, I never really had that. Usually I get a title, a lyric or some chords based on just an idea. Sometimes I get a kind of keyboard idea that I want to use in a particularly feel with the guitar. To me it’s very important to write the lyrics and the music at the same time. I don’t like writing the music and sticking the lyrics on it. It’s a bit fake to do that. For example: on ‘Pure’ there is a song called ‘Space Cadet’ which is the second part of ‘Comatose’. In the end of that song there is a very dark part which sounds like a mellotron-note. The lyrics are about a child who’s lost his way at school. He finds out that everybody is against him. So he’s carrying a gun with him during schooldays. That’s a very chilly moment, and the music has to flow with the lyrics”. Thanks for your time and answers, Nick!
Symfo-Index.