Haken
Ten years into their career, leading UK proggers Haken are releasing their first concert recording. Ross Jennings tells us how fan power made L-1VE happen, and reveals his six all-time favourite live albums.
Singer Ross Jennings talks live albums as Haken release their first one.
“I’m a big fan of live albums,” says Haken’s Ross Jennings. “Whenever I’d want to discover new bands, instead of buying their whole discography, I’d approach their live album first. When a band goes out to promote their latest release, they’ve also got to serve up the greatest hits, so a record like Genesis’ Seconds
Out or Gentle Giant’s Playing The Fool really represents their work over time. How a band plays live is really important.”
Last year Haken played across Europe and the US on their 10th-anniversary tour, and the time was right for their own first foray into concert recording. L-1VE (“You can call it Live One,” says the singer helpfully) was recorded last April on the final date of the tour at Amsterdam’s Melkweg, one of that city’s more storied venues.
Capturing a band clearly in their stride, L-1VE serves as a timely reminder of the music that’s earned the sextet their place at modern prog’s top table. With a set drawing on 2010 debut Aquarius, Visions, their towering breakthrough record The Mountain and acclaimed current offering Affinity, it certainly lives up to Jennings’ ‘greatest hits’ criterion.
“For me it’s always been a bucketlist item,” he reveals. “Every band wants to tick the live album box, the acoustic album box and the covers album box, so for now at least we can tick one of those three.
“To be honest we’d always been in two minds about it. We thought we’d wait until the next tour, and then the next. But we started receiving a lot of email and Facebook messages from fans crying out for a live album. It started off casual, then they started sending emails to the label requesting it. Then they started a petition on our Facebook group, Haken Haven, obtaining signatures. The power of the people got to us in the end!”
That level of fan fervour is pretty reassuring for the band, and it’s interesting to know there’s still an undiminished appetite for live records. Just what is it about a good concert recording that retains such allure?
“Playing live is a different beast,” offers Jennings, “and I guess people want to ‘own’ that live experience and draw on it, relive it, at home. There’s something quite magical when we play live that I can’t really explain.
“With L-1ve we wanted to capture how it felt to be in the audience, in the pit. It took months of hard work to put all the elements together, to mix the sound and edit the film footage. Each member of the band had to listen all the way through to make sure they were happy with their parts.
“These days you can take little pieces from other shows, but we haven’t done much of that at all. We just fixed a few small technical glitches we really couldn’t live with.”
You can almost hear the purists’ hackles rise, but when you’re going to this trouble to make a one-off document of your band’s first decade, you can surely be forgiven a few little tweaks in post.
With the sextet already working on their fifth album and looking ahead, the release of their debut live record feels like a career landmark. “We wanted to celebrate our anniversary,” explains Jennings. “It made sense to draw a line under those 10 years, and with this live album there’s a sense of the end of a chapter.”
L-1ve is out now via InsideOut. For more information, see www.hakenmusic.com.