And on the 5th day, Steve talked about working with Theo Travis.
Day five of the ‘collaborators that changed my music-life’ series, and we reach someone with whom I had from the very first time we played a quite amazing synergy. Not til I played with Daniel Berkman did I find another musician with whom it felt like we could do nothing wrong… Theo and I met on a gig in Norwich, the day after the end of the tour I did opening for Level 42 in 2002 – it was a mini-festival of solo performers, each of whom had to overlap with the next player. I’m trying to remember which was round it went, but I either joined the end of Theo’s set, and then ceded to Roger Eno, or the other way round. Suffice to say, the little bit of crossover in my playing with Theo was enough for us to make plans to play together again soon after. It must’ve been very soon after, because I remember the first time we played, I was still using a Soundblaster soundcard, with just a stereo input, and I replaced that with some of the money I made on the Level 42 tour!
Playing with Theo was the pinnacle of the early collaboration period for me, and there was pretty much nothing we ever did that I didn’t love. It was really interesting because our sound was constantly developing and evolving through the time we played together, but we never went through a period of making a bad noise. Some of the musical relationships I’ll be detailing in this series were great because they provided space for experiments that didn’t initially bear fruit, but Theo was definitely the first person I played with where just about everything we ever did was releasable. He was also the first melody instrument collaborator that I’d had – although his exquisite use of the DL4 allowed him to do some amazing textures and harmony – for a lot of the time, my primary role was harmonic and textural, and that gave me space to focus on those sounds, on building my vocabulary of textural pad sounds and looping techniques to layer them in interesting ways. Which had a massive effect on my solo playing thereafter (compare Not Dancing For Chicken with Grace And Gratitude, and you’ll hear what playing with Theo did to my solo work!)
When we finally recorded For The Love Of Open Spaces, every track was a pure improvisation. No discussion of keys or moods or anything, except on the track ‘Lovely’, where I said ‘let’s try one without any looping’. But, for every track we did, we tried to repeat the same idea, and see if there was a better take of that idea once we’d played it through. The whole album is first takes. While we did quite successfully transition those recordings into re-performable compositions, at the time, the spontaneity of the original each time was where the magic was.
Theo and I played a fair bit together between 2003 and 2006, including a Jazz Services-funded tour, from which we have a really good live recording that I’ve recently remastered and will be reissuing soon as part of an expanded deluxe download version of For The Love Of Open Spaces, along with a remaster of our earliest record – It’s Not Going To Happen, which was released in a limited edition of 100 to the first 100 pre-orders of the CD when it came out in 2003. We also met up recently when LEYlines opened for Soft Machine, and talked about doing something new together. I really hope that happens. Theo’s a wonderful human, and a quite extraordinary musician. Go check out his other music on his Bandcamp page.