FIRTH OF FIFTH

Banks: “I’d written a piece for Foxtrot, which had this piano bit that ended up as the introduction to Firth Of Fifth. I was quite excited about it but the others less so. I carried on working on the idea and wrote a piece I thought sounded really good on its own, and that if I could swing it by the rest of them I could do it as an introduction. We’d done Horizons [on

Foxtrot], so I thought the idea of letting one person just do a bit was acceptable.

Hackett: “There’s something almost religious about Tony’s famous introduction. It’s a cross between gospel, blues and classical.”

Collins: “We were steamrollered into Firth Of Fifth, but it worked. Tony was good at that, and still is. When someone comes in with something and it’s full of odd time signatures and odd bar lengths with a few speed-ups and a few slow-downs, it’s a drummer’s nightmare. You go: “Oh my god, how am I gonna play this and make it sound natural?” But that’s what we did. He came in with this fully composed thing, which we ended up doing as he wrote it. I remember it was a bit wonky in the middle. I tried to correct it by putting a cabasa on it, and it just made it worse.”

Gabriel: “Steve had definitely gained in confidence. Firth Of Fifth is very much a Tony piece in terms of how it started and how it’s built, but Steve did let loose, and I think probably in the best way right up to that point at the end. It was his coming-of-age album in a lot of ways.”