Sinds kort ligt er een verzamelaar op de markt van de band Parallel Or Ninety Degrees, kortweg Po90. Geen ‘best of’, maar eerder een overzicht van de ontwikkeling van een band die nooit stil heeft willen staan zonder daarbij de eigen muzikale voorliefdes uit het oog te verliezen. Toetsenist, zanger en mastermind Andy Tillison Diskdrive licht aan de hand van een paar vragen het één en ander toe. Ben je nog onbevredigd, lees dan ook de recensie van de verzamelaar in ditzelfde nummer en speur ze op via het wereldwijde web!
To start with a better known band: is there any chance that Po90 might be picked up be the fans of The Tangent and thus at last become deservedly more famous than the latter? Because in my humble opinion that would be pure justice with all the richness of real progressive ideas I encountered on those two discs. Hi there Bart, nice to answer your questions and thanks for the kind words. Of course, your question is a little loaded, as you say 'deservedly more famous' than The Tangent. This I can understand, but of course there are also those people who prefer Tangent, some indeed who never liked Po90 at all. Naturally I do hope that this earlier work will interest those who have come to know me through my work with The Tangent. Po90 was always a progressive rock band. We never distanced ourselves from the title as many others have done, choosing instead to try and modify it and bring it into the third millennium. The Tangent has been more openly nostalgic with prog rock, however I still feel that there was a real validity to its music, particularly in the lyrics.
Let me be very honest (I do will feel the need to say it in the upcoming review): you aren't a natural born vocalist. You tell the stories of the music very well, but you don't express it vocally like, say, Devin Townsend does. A lot of famous musicians (Mark Knopfler, Frank Zappa) get away with that, and have their own reasons to do and have done so. But what is your own reason for not getting an expressive vocalist for this very expressive band? The voice question gets asked a lot, and it’s a very simple matter of taste really. There are those who think Dylan can’t sing, hate his voice - yet the whole history of serious rock and roll is resting on a column that his individuality put there. I am not a technically good singer at all. But my voice has character – something important when you are trying to say something. I am also the writer of the words, words that are important in both the bands with which I work and delivering those words is to me more important than playing the keyboards. I put my head up and if people like they can throw tomatoes at it. I really don’t care. I will keep singing until they nail my coffin shut, and after that I’ll still try to piss everyone off in the cemetery.
When listening to the songs on the record, I get particularly blown away by later songs which really are exploring new territories when talking about crossing genre boundaries. Is this caused mainly by the new musicians in the band, and where did you find them? Dan Watts and Alex King introduced me to a lot of new music when they joined the band. Together we did find that despite coming from different age ranges (they are a LOT younger than me) we still had similar ideas about what we wanted to achieve, blending things together in the same way as Yes and The Nice were thirty years before us, but we had Roni Size, Radiohead, Muse, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson to look at, as well as classical, jazz and older prog. The result was exciting for us all, Alex and Dan were hearing Peter Hammill and early Genesis for the first time in their lives, and I was tuning into Ian Brown (Stone Roses) and Sigur Ros, Cooper Temple Clause etc. The result was the two later Po90 albums, Unbranded and More Exotic Ways To Die. Although these used techniques not normally found in Prog Rock (drum loops, scratching, lo-fi etc) the albums were still progressive in nature; the mellotrons, hammonds and synths were still in there with the long format pieces, the jazz rubbing up against punky metal, the dance grooves against the Genesis style stuff. Where Porcupine Tree seemed to eschew the more traditional stuff, Po90 embraced it fully – that didn’t in any way make us better (I’m a very big PT fan), it made us different from them.
What is your vision on making music in general? Is it more inspiring to jam together in a room or work on material on your own? I love making music in all means. Whether it’s alone on a walk whistling something and drumming on my legs, jamming with musicians, working alone in a studio, and that most overlooked method, simply talking with and hanging with musicians without any instruments at all... I honestly believe a lot of Po90’s inspiration came from evenings chatting in the pub and gave the group its ability to compromise with each other and accept other ideas. But at 50 years old, with 30 years of musical experience behind me with very little financial success I’m still addicted to the whole process despite having lost partners, homes and many possessions as a result of it.
Back to The Tangent again... Do you secretly imagine a future wherein you have become so bloody famous and rich that you have no more boundaries when reviving Po90? Do you perhaps see a future wherein the band can properly record an album worthy of worldwide admiration? I don’t imagine any future in which I become either famous or rich. I used to when I was a kid. But if I’d been concerned about money or fame, I wouldn’t have chosen to form a progrock band in 1996, neither would Roine Stolt, Neal Morse or Christina Booth. None of us do this for riches, we do it because we have to and sometimes it’s a bloody nuisance. But all of us are in the unique position of being still compositionally active. Despite our age, this is still our first time around. The stuff we write is still our breakthrough material. We aren’t going around playing our Greatest Hits tours like many much more well known bands have to. I can’t really imagine Dave Gilmour thinking 'Great!!, ‘Shine On’ next', or David Bowie looking forward to playing ‘Ziggy again’. These guys just have to play what their audience demands. We’re still hoping our next albums will be the One, and theirs are a long time ago. So in that respect it’s bizarre, but Roine, Neal and the rest are still more like younger up and coming musicians. We’re still on our way. As for any future for Po90, all I can say is that we never split up. We were so disorganised we forgot to split up. I hope there will be more music from that name in the future, with the same philosophy we had before. I don’ know when, who, how. But I do hope it will happen, sooner rather than later.
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