THE CINEMA SHOW
This is a musical opera which is clearly divided into two parts: the first is an acoustic song written by Rutherford, the second a drawn-out instrumental part written and played by Banks, Collins and Rutherford.
Rutherford, speaking in 2007: “Normally, you’ve got twelve strings and they’re paired up and you tune each pair to the same note. I started tuning each pair to harmony notes, which is how the song starts with that sort of run down. Now, I haven’t got a clue what the hell the tuning is. The other day, in New York, they were saying: ‘Oh, let’s do the first half of Cinema
Show, maybe.’ And I said: ‘I’ve no idea how I played it. You have to work a compromised version out.’”
Hackett: “I’ve come to enjoy this song very much, but at the time I didn’t feel it was strong. I realise it’s very much a people’s favourite, they like it very much and I’ve tried to understand why. I think it’s probably because it’s very romantic. It has a lot of sections in it and a lot of good bits, but I wouldn’t necessarily say the actual song is the strongest bit of it. But it did work very well live.”
Banks: “The instrumental at the end was probably the best one we did at this stage of our careers. Mike had this riff in 7/8 which just went ‘dang, dang, dang’ and he’d just be playing along. So we put all this together and I just improvised for hours and got all the little bits and pieces going. We changed the chords and we ended up with this piece, and I think it has such a strong rhythm. A lot of things you play on it could be really good, but I got one or two quite good melodies on top of it and it built up to a very nice climax.
“It was probably better on stage than it is on the album, in many ways, because on the album it fades out into the next bit, which I’m not too sure is quite so good. It was an exciting thing to create at the time and we were very pleased with it. The funny thing about it was when [manager] Tony Stratton-Smith heard the album, he didn’t like that part. He thought we were trying to do something different, and that we should stick with what we knew best. But we were very convinced that this should go on the album. You look at it now and realise that to have left that off would have been a bit of tragedy, really.”