Name That Tune
Dave Sinclair brings the names in overground.
“Depends how you say this one. I got the idea for this first section of the piece from my cousin, Nigel Blow, who was always messing around with nice chord sequences on the piano. By the way, both Nigel and myself are related to the famous John Blow (1649-1708) who, apart from being a composer, was the choirmaster and organist at St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.”
“Probably my take at the time on: why shouldn’t lovers be friends, and why shouldn’t friends be lovers?”
“Again, there are a few connotations. Seventy-six appeared many times in my life. I counted the number of beats in this section, and I ‘made it 76’ altogether.”
“One of the engineers at Decca used to rig up various ingenious devices to pass the time while waiting for recording to begin. One of these was a kind of ski run made of string, with these little hankies on it. A fan, which could have been in one of the apparatus being used at the time, was causing the paper hankies to jump down along the string. This echoed the wind sound from the actual recording.”
“Maybe this one has to be left to the imagination, but I know you can get away with a lot when you are a tiny tot. Sometimes snoring is not very tuneful.”
“Well, I’m sure this title refers to the fact that my solo, on this occasion, was left completely untouched – probably the first and only one played. There had probably been at least one edit on all the other solos.”
“This track really sums up my mood at that time. One of not really being in tune with, and feeling apart from, what was going on in other people’s so-called conventional lifestyles.”
“Yes… the empty bottles on the high shelf, all the way around my little room in the basement (nine feet underground) of Tony Coe’s house, Lexington House, in the Old Dover Road, Canterbury (pictured). I remember consuming some pretty explosive stuff there!”
When they started working out how to follow their electrifying debut LP, Where It All Began, UK progressive post-rockers Coldbones were faced with a difficult task. Cutting through the potential indecision, drummer Max Parr brought an idea to the rest of the band.
“A couple of years ago, in the summer of 2018, I approached the guys and said, ‘Look, I think we should do a concept about the world ending as we know it.’ I wanted to stay away from that post-apocalypse [as seen in other fiction], and just go for a whole new cataclysmic event that shapes the world in an entirely different way. We used past events and works of fiction to shape these two big catastrophes that are occurring on the album.”
The concept of what was to become The Cataclysm was welcomed positively, and the band set to writing, enlisting the help of artist Alice Urbino to create the album artwork early in the process.
“I think we had one or two demos,” recalls guitarist Jordan Gilbert, “but it was, like, straight away let’s get some artwork together. The first album, Where It All Began, we had a rough concept that was pieced together as we went, but this one, it was very much [there] from the outset. We had the vision of what we wanted it to look like with the artwork, and we wanted it to sound like [that].”
Writing collaboratively, the band have been together long enough to now have a streamlined process, where tracks were assembled into the narrative as they
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