Winter Is Coming
He’s gone from being a piano-playing child prodigy to an X Factor contestant to working alongside prog royalty such as Andy Latimer and Francis Dunnery. Now Peter Jones is concentrating on his own music once more, with a particularly seasonal slice of pro
From touring with Camel to recording with Francis Dunnery, the last few years have been a blizzard of activity for Peter Jones. But as he releases
The Depths Of Winter, his third album as Tiger Moth Tales, the one-time pop wannabe reveals how his success in the prog world has come at a price.
“Japanese audiences are so enthusiastic, and so polite,” says Jones. He was there in
May last year, playing keyboards for Camel on their mini tour of the country. “There’d be this real explosion of applause and then… it’d stop dead, and they’d be absolutely silent during the performance.”
Let’s mention it here, and only once: Jones has been blind since he was just 15 months old. He experiences the world through such ‘sound pictures’ – audio and no video. It’s a pretty humbling and sobering thought for those of us blessed with sight, and while his impairment is not the crux of his many achievements, it still makes them that bit more admirable.
Andy Latimer was pointed his way on the strength of Cocoon, the remarkable 2014 debut album of Jones’ one-man prog-ject, Tiger
Moth Tales. Latimer asked him to audition, so Jones sent him the keyboard parts for Ice, rendered as faithfully as he could make them.
“I hate to admit, I didn’t really know any of Camel’s stuff at the time,” says Jones. “But since then I’ve been really drawn into it – they’re so impressive. During Lady Fantasy
I have to play just two chords while Andy solos, and one night on tour I was there thinking, ‘Wow, when I was a kid I wanted to be Tony Banks in Genesis, but now I’m Pete Jones in Camel!’ It’s such an honour.”
At 37, Jones has found himself coming full circle, back to the bosom of the prog world. He was something of a child prodigy on the piano, taking his grade exams early and composing music of his own from the age of eight. By the time he was 11 he had discovered his parents’ records – Queen, Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds, Phil Collins and Abacab-era Genesis, later moving on to the Gabriel era – and began writing his own long, complex instrumentals.
“The Cinema Show, In The Cage, Seconds Out – I could play it all. Tony Banks was a guru for me. I was probably a better player then than I am now. My teachers encouraged me to become a concert pianist.”
And then he went and discovered girls.
His songwriting took a poppy turn involving “slushy love songs”, before he went on to model himself on his other hero, Paul Carrack, plus Bryan Adams, George Michael and other leaders of the ‘adult contemporary’ market. He and his school friend, singer Emma Paine, decided to take a gap year after school and try for a career in music. One year turned into 13 as the duo made a decent living playing the UK’s pub and club circuit, going under the none-more-cabaret name of 2 To Go.
In 2004 they hit real paydirt when they made the last few rounds of UK TV talent show The X Factor, but although the gigs kept coming and Jones released an album, Look At Me Now, he didn’t find his artistic career going as he’d hoped.
“I was writing pop, rock, funk, ballads, and one big pop producer actually told me I was too good at doing everything, and I should try ‘to cultivate an excellent standard of mediocrity’. I was so disillusioned with it all, and three or four years back I thought, ‘Well, that’s it then, I’ll never get recognition for writing my own songs.’ That’s when I started writing Cocoon.”
An affectionate and fun tribute to Trumpton-era childhood, the proggy Cocoon showed off Jones’ gifts as a seriously gifted multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and composer, well versed in the musical vocabulary and lyrical whimsy of progressive music’s golden age. It was as if he was finally back where he belonged.
He followed it up with the acclaimed Story Tellers Volume 1, recorded over February
2015, which recounted fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty. When instrumental prog group Red Bazar were looking for a vocalist and lyricist, fellow Nottingham boy Jones offered his services, and the resultant album, 2016’s Tales From The Bookcase, earned them plaudits in the prog press. Now Jones fronts them live, and when he plays out as Tiger Moth Tales, Red Bazar are his band.
Since Cocoon, Jones hasn’t really stopped. He played at Summer’s End festival, Prog Dreams in Holland, and this year’s ProgStock in New Jersey. There he joined Dave Kerzner onstage for a tribute to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, and Francis Dunnery was there on the bill too. Jones played keys on Dunnery’s 2016 album Return To The Wild Country after they were introduced by a mutual friend. (“He’s a great guy to play with,” says Jones. “He certainly knows what he wants!”)
Add Camel into this mix and it’s perhaps understandable why the third Tiger Moth
Tales album, The Depths Of Winter, has been so long in coming. But it wasn’t just time that was against Jones. Not only did his trusty 8-track cassette studio setup start breaking down, but so did he.
“I’m not generally a tortured soul, but this time last year I had a bad bit of depression going on. I can’t tell you why, because I was having what should have been some of the best times of my life. But as the highs got higher, the lows got lower. This voice in my head kept telling me that the music wasn’t worth it and I should jack it in. I’d never had it to that extent, but then I’d never been quite so earnest about anything as I was with the prog. I’d been hard at it for four years and was so determined, and maybe that made me question myself and doubt myself all the more.”
Some of that angst permeated the album itself. Sophisticated, mature and utterly breathtaking in parts, The Depths Of Winter presents many sides of the fourth season.
Its bleakest moment is Exposure, a desolate, dark piece inspired by Wilfred Owen’s First World War poem of the same name. Its warmest peak is the welcome hug of Hygge, a Genesis-style ballad that evokes that trendy Danish sense of cosiness, of hearth and heart on a cold day. If Radio 2 had a progressive bone in their body, they’d seize on this and put it on their playlist in time for Christmas.
Indeed, initially Jones saw The Depths Of Winter as a Christmas album, but White Knight’s label head, Magenta’s own Rob Reed, advised against it, concerned the album would be seen as a novelty and dropped quicker than a Top Gear annual on New Year’s Day. And so winter is here in all its physical and allegorical forms. Tiger Moth Tales’ trademark quirkiness is present on Sleigh Ride, an unashamedly jolly piece of trek music that owes a large debt to Steve Hackett, with an irresistible motif made up of long, sustained guitar lines and volume swells.
Featuring a Salvation Army-style brass section and a terrifying guitar solo from guest player Luke Machin, the epic Winter Maker (which drove this writer to put the heating on while listening) draws on Biboon, the wind spirit in the culture of the Ojibwe, a Native American tribe.
Co-written with friend and talented voice actor Jamie Ambler, The Ballad Of Longshanks John retells the fabled death of Robin Hood, and comes complete with an evocative radio play-style spoken-word intro – as well as a cheeky nod to Clannad’s famous Robin Of Sherwood TV theme.
“It’s this great, alternative Yuletide thing,” says Jones. “I’m big into radio plays. I know not everyone’s into spoken parts in songs, but I am. The Tears Of Frigga was also written with Jamie. It’s this Viking mythology thing set to a prog soundtrack, I’m very pleased with that one. It’s got this plinky-plonky
5/4 glockenspiel part that I think of as a Rob Reed bit – it’s very Mike Oldfield. And while I don’t do many keyboard solos,
I’m very proud of the one on there.”
Jones underplays his musicality, but the album’s full of it. Complete with jazzy clarinet, the elegiac Take The Memory deals with loss and how that is amplified for families during the festive period. Migration, despite its politically charged title, was actually inspired by a story Jones read about… a stoat.
It’s a beautifully produced, highly evocative album imbued with the spirit of its season, and of progressive music. Far from being a novelty, The Depths Of Winter is Jones’ finest work to date.
“To be terribly metaphorical, it’s been like getting through a winter myself. Now I can listen to it with an air of detachment, and it’s good. I’m pretty chipper now! This year really has been amazing.”
And 2018’s set to be pretty good for him too. With some Tiger Moth Tales dates in the works to support The Depths Of Winter, there’s a new Red Bazar record imminent, and even talk of Story Tellers Part Two. He’ll play keys for Dunnery in January on his three UK dates marking the 30th anniversary of It Bites’ Eat Me In St. Louis, and will also rejoin Camel as they tour Moonmadness, including a Royal Albert Hall show in September.
Firmly back in the prog fold, Peter Jones is becoming a man for all seasons.
The Depths Of Winter is our now via White Knight. See www.tigermothtales.com for details.
“I CAN LISTEN TO THE ALBUM WITH AN AIR OF DETACHMENT, AND IT’S GOOD. I’M PRETTY CHIPPER NOW! THIS YEAR
REALLY HAS BEEN AMAZING.”