Greenslade ________
The prog band with two keyboard players and no guitarist tell their tale.
Greenslade’s 70s heyday might have been short-lived, but with their back catalogue now getting the reissue treatment, Prog discovers the story behind this “thinking man’s band”, from their controversial choice to disregard guitars, to unlikely tour-mates, and just what the future might hold…
“After all this time, we’ll be an overnight success!” Dave Greenslade
“I’ll tell you what is really staggering – it’s 47 years since the first Greenslade album and now they are all being re-released across the world,” says Dave Greenslade. “After all this time, we’ll be an overnight success!”
Greenslade were only around for a relatively short time, from autumn 1972 until their last gig at Barbarella’s, Birmingham in December 1975. The group recorded for a major label, Warner Brothers, and Spyglass Guest (1974) reached No. 34 in the UK album charts.
That album has been remastered and re-released on Cherry Red/Esoteric, along with the group’s 1973 debut, Greenslade, and Bedside Manners Are Extra, which was originally released later that same year, while 1975’s Time And Tide is out February 22. If the group have been overlooked a little in prog history, these double disc sets – including Sounds Of The Seventies and BBC In Concert sessions and a DVD comprising promo videos and Old Grey Whistle Test footage – should help right that imbalance.
“I haven’t listened to the music in a long time so I came back to it really fresh, and though I say it myself, I’m very proud of these compositions,” says
Greenslade. “I’m lucky to have had a chance to form a band with those guys. We made a great combination. And it was a most unusual band at the time – no guitar and two keyboard players.”
Greenslade had played keyboards in Colosseum and, when they broke up in 1971, he was left with a number of unrecorded pieces, so looked to form a new band. Firstly he recruited Colosseum bass guitarist Tony Reeves, who got in touch with keyboard player and vocalist Dave Lawson, who had been in Samurai and Web. He in turn contacted drummer Andy McCulloch, who’d played in Fields and King Crimson. One can hear some similarities in the
music of
Greenslade, particularly their debut album, and Colosseum’s side-long Valentyne Suite, which was largely written by the keyboard player, but overall it’s quite different in feel. So had Greenslade any plans as to the sort of music he was going to make in his new group?
“It wasn’t a conscious thing, it was just a development,” he replies. “I never thought, ‘Come on, lads, let’s form a prog rock band!’ It never crossed my mind. So very quickly the four of us got together and started rehearsing and writing – I was writing a lot of stuff. We had great fun, and we got signed up to management.”
The fact that Greenslade had no guitarist and two keyboard players gave them a certain hip cachet at the time, but to some, such a line-up appeared to be ill-advised.
“When I told my chums and musical colleagues that I was going to form a band without a guitar – I didn’t have anything against guitars I just had this idea in my head of two keyboard players using an array of instruments – everyone said, ‘It’ll never work, Dave.’ Well, they were wrong.”
Clem Clempson, formerly of Colosseum and then in Humble Pie, did play guitar on two tracks on Spyglass Guest, but apart from that it was all keyboards. Dave Lawson remembers how, from the outset, their choice of instrumentation contributed to the group’s particular sound and approach.
“We didn’t give the guitars a thought at the time,” says Lawson. “We just jammed with two keyboards and it seemed to work. With a guitar you’ve got a weapon in your hand, you wind it up and it’s very powerful. It’s extremely dynamic whereas an electronic keyboard isn’t, really. You can wind clavinets up because they’ve got pick-ups in them, and you’ve got synthesisers which are powerful, but not in the same way as a guitar.
“It was a mixed bag because I was bringing some Samurai and Web things to the party and Dave had the music that he’d been writing when he was in Colosseum. Bar some numbers that Dave had written in their entirety, he would have chord sequences and I’d come up with a melody line and lyrics, and we’d knock it into shape from there.”
Greenslade feels that Bedside Manners Are Extra is perhaps his favourite of the band’s albums, but agrees that their self-titled debut – “Virgin Greenslade”, as he puts it – has a particular freshness about it. “There’s a very interesting selection of material on the first album; I’ve never really heard any other band play like that at all,” he says. But although some of the music is rhythmically and melodically complex, from the outset the group’s considerable technical ability always served the material, as demonstrated on the twists and turns of the instrumental An English Western. And although McCulloch isn’t mentioned as often as his more famous peers, his speed, deftness and impeccable timing made him one of the most gifted rock drummers of his generation.
“Well, Dave Lawson was, and still is, a fabulous player, and it’s a question of having an affinity with the guys you are working with,” Greenslade says. “And musically, we just slotted in like a jigsaw puzzle with the right pieces.
“Although we didn’t look like one, we were actually a live band,” he continues. “We enjoyed playing live more than being in the studio. We would rehearse the material, do a perfectly good recording and then we went on the road, and in six months… wow! We’d developed those pieces again, the result of which is heard on some of these new releases.”
But was it a problem that the group didn’t have an onstage frontman?
“That’s the thing, we did have someone out at the front,” Greenslade replies. “The most unlikely person – the bass player, Tony Reeves. And he was more than a bass player: if you listen to his lines they were almost like front line guitar work, and we let him have his head in that direction, because he was very good at it.
“Each of us were playing at least three keyboards. It must have been a nightmare for the road crew – six keyboards in a band – and they weren’t small and portable in those days – bloody great Hammonds and Mellotrons. I played the Hammond quite a bit, and a Fender Rhodes. Then I bought an RMI, an American electric piano and an ARP synth. Dave had a lovely ARP, and we wrote for all these voices.”
“It was a kind of thinking man’s band,” says Lawson. “We used to get quite a large following of gear heads, because synthesis was in its infancy and I was slightly unusual because I chose an ARP. After the gig all these guys would be queuing up for autographs in loon pants and tie-dye t-shirts, with not a mini-skirted fan among them, except perhaps a Scotsman.”
But when the band strayed away from this core audience, enthusiasm was not guaranteed. Lawson recalls one time when they appeared live on a TV programme.
“The audience, mainly teenage girls, had to be bribed with T-shirts and all sorts of things to even clap, because Slade were on the bill as well. So it was quite confusing.”
Although Lawson reckons that Greenslade were, image-wise, “a bit of a low-profile band”, by 1975, Bambi, the wife of music critic Robin Denselow, made clothes for them. Lawson wore a fetching number with diamanté trim, McCulloch had lived a while in Japan and dressed with a Japanese theme,
while incumbent bass player Martin Briley was kitted out in a skeleton suit. “Dave had a polka dot thing – he could have doubled in Billy Smart’s circus. It was the closest we got to Genesis,” Lawson quips.
And on another occasion, their keyboards attracted some unwanted attention from a particular type of gear head, for in a typically odd 70s billing, Greenslade toured in the States with Kraftwerk.
“In those days the sounds were made rather than just pressing a button,” Lawson explains. “On an ARP Odyssey, if you can imagine a surface with loads of little faders on it, all those faders are ‘in tune’, if you like, so you are in tune when you play the thing. When I got onstage, one of Kraftwerk’s crew – or Kraftwerk – had pulled every single fader down to zero, so the solo must have been the weirdest thing because I was trying to tune it at the same time as play. I mentioned it to our roadie, an ex-marine we called Lurch – huge, about six foot seven. Lurch wanted to have a word with Wolfgang [Flür], and Kraftwerk barricaded themselves in the dressing room. Our reviews were great and Kraftwerk’s weren’t very special, put it that way, so we were asked to leave the tour.”
On Spyglass Guest it might have seemed that the two Daves were going their separate ways as they recorded some of their compositions in isolation, although they would both play on them live. But this was partly out of necessity as album deadlines were always looming and any leisure time away from playing live would likely involve writing new material.
“I’d have my Fender Rhodes suitcase at home and a 7ips Revox tape recorder,” Lawson explains. “When I got to Doldrums, I recorded it and thought, well, there’s not a lot wrong with this recording. I wasn’t going to do it again in the studio. It wasn’t a cop out – I’d got it where I wanted it.”
After they released Time And
Tide in 1975, the life of the band was cut rather cruelly short. They were with a management company who also looked after artistes like Rod Stewart, and things weren’t working out.
“We were always treated by the management as something else because they didn’t understand our music anyway,” Lawson recalls. “It sounds arrogant but they didn’t have a clue or the faith to carry it forward. When I took the decision to leave the band, the van was on its last legs, we didn’t have a car to take the band around in, the infrastructure was crumbling and I couldn’t see that we had a future.”
Greenslade is loath to go into too much detail, but he notes that the two parties were bound together by a contract and so the only other option would have been to buy themselves out, which would have been beyond their means.
He was approached by the producers of the BBC TV series Gangsters, which ran for three years in the 70s and he has continued writing soundtrack music, alongside an intermittent solo recording career which began in 1979 with The Pentateuch Of The Cosmogony, a kind of multimedia concept album with illustrations by fantasy artist Patrick Woodroffe. While still in Greenslade, Lawson had been approached to do session work, initially for Stackridge’s album Mr Mick.
He become “the synth guy you go to” in film music. He scored the famous cantina scene in Star Wars and has worked on a number of other high-profile films like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Dark Crystal, and the
BBC TV series The Blue Planet.
Greenslade and Lawson are both musically active and clearly have a great respect for each other. A version of Greenslade reformed in 2000 and made an album, Large Afternoon, but in the opinion of the man who gave the group its name, it didn’t have the magic of the original line-up. So is there any chance of more from the group, in some shape or form, live or on record?
“I wish the four of us now could go and do it all again, quite frankly,” says Greenslade. There are health issues that mitigate against them playing live, but Lawson reveals that he has some material left over from the 70s and that Greenslade played him some demos of material from the Pentateuch… era that could be worked on.
“It would be nice to do something, but the practicalities of it all… it’s a possibility,” says Lawson after a pause. “It hasn’t been shelved for definite. The material’s certainly there.”
The Greenslade expanded and remastered editions are available from Cherry Red/Esoteric. See www.cherryred.co.uk/artists/greenslade for more information.
“It would be nice to do something now, but the practicalities of it all… it’s a possibility.”
Dave Lawson