OMEGA POINT
Ex-The Reasoning bassist teams up with Karnataka and Ghost Community players.
MATTHEW COHEN HAS plenty of prog pedigree. As a result, much is expected from his new band, Omega Point, whose debut album A Great Escape has just been released. In September 2019, Cohen played his farewell show with The Reasoning, at The Robin 2, and started to contemplate his next move. Unfortunately, it was the wrong one.
“Once I’d done the last Reasoning show, I went out with a heavy metal band called Nine Miles Down,” he recalls. “We were supporting British Lion, and it was good fun, especially to play with one of my heroes, Steve Harris, but I actually hated the experience. I could see so many things being done and I’d be thinking, ‘No, I wouldn’t have done it that way…’ So I made my decision then, that all my energy was going to go towards this. I had a few ideas and started putting them down, and then we really started off in January 2020. And then it all kicked off, didn’t it?” [Laughs.]
Omega Point reunites Cohen with Ghost Community vocalist John-Paul Vaughan, and more recently with ex-Reasoning drummer Vinden Wylde (although, just to make things complicated, Ghost Community drummer Jake Bradford-Sharp plays on the album). Best of all, the forming of a new band has given Cohen the chance to work alongside guitarist Paul Davies, formerly of Karnataka and Panic Room, for the first time.
“I got back in touch with the guys and that was it,” he says. “Especially when lockdown hit, it was just a case of,‘Let’s make a fucking album! Let’s make a band!’ Paul got up with me at the farewell Reasoning show in 2019, and we’ve been talking for years and years. So this was that opportunity and I’m really happy about it.”
With their line-up coming together in earnest in early 2020, Omega Point have had an awkward gestation. But
A Great Escape is a startlingly cohesive piece of work: dark and melodramatic, each of its five lengthy tracks seems to tell a standalone story, although Cohen definitely isn’t going to tell us what those stories are about.
“I can’t!” he laughs. “The album does have a theme and it’s nothing to do with Covid, because that’s the last thing anybody needs! But I don’t want to give the game away. That sounds like a twattish thing to do, but I don’t want people to have preconceptions. All I will say that is that it’s about seeing beauty from a different angle.”
Armed with a classy debut and shitloads of enthusiasm, Cohen is relishing the prospect of getting back on the road and honing Omega Point as a live unit. Justifiably, the bassist absolutely loves it when a plan comes together.
“At the start I thought: ‘If I’m going to do this, it’s going to be done properly, and it’s going to be with the right people, and it’s going to be honest and mean something.’ I just miss that thrill of being out with your mates and having a bloody good time, and playing music you’ve created and that you love. So yeah, this is the band and I’m in this for the long haul now.”
“I MISS THAT THRILL OF BEING OUT WITH YOUR MATES AND PLAYING MUSIC YOU’VE CREATED AND THAT YOU LOVE.”