From: drd@delcam.com (David Dunnington)
Subject: Silver Song interview
To: paperlate@ansto.gov.au
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 96 23:02:05 BST
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Reply-To: drd@delcam.com (David Dunnington)
I've had this PC interview from 1974 kicking around on my disk ever since I e-mailed it to Scott MacMahon for inclusion in the discography
a while back. I know that not everyone has access to a recent copy of the discography, so here goes...
This is from a tape recording of a 1974 interview with Phil Collins culminating in "Silver Song", obtained from a collector back in 1980. It seems as though Collins's collaboration on the aborted single was due to a prevailing mood to encourage members of the band to have "outlets" in order to offset the effects of their gruelling tour schedule. Collins indicates that the song would be released as a single, probably in his name. The uncertainty with which this is voiced suggests that it was, perhaps, the disputed ownership of the material which prevented it's release: Philips wrote the song (possibly with Rutherford), yet Collins was keen to release the single under his name.
The interview also reveals some futher connections with other prog rock musicians and interesting information about Collins's activities and attitude to touring in 1974. I will attempt to transcribe...
PC: ... sometime between the 1st and the 10th.
Int: And will it be quite a long tour of England?
PC: No it won't, unfortunately, because we have had to move things around. We'll only be doing Manchester for 2 nights and then there's a Wembley date, I think, and a few other dates - I don't really know, they havn't actually been fixed yet, but they are all in the pipeline. After that we finish somewhere in England and go straight to America, for like 3 or 4 days between the next gig!
Int: We are trying to remember the name of *your* band.
PC: Oh the pub band? That was called "Zox And The Radar Boys" which was ... er ... the agent, Paul Conroy was getting us a few pubs and clubs to do. It was his idea, so we thought, well, a name is only a name so why not?
Int: Mmm. And there was somebody else in there, someone from Yes or something?
PC: Peter Banks was in it, and he was in "Flash" at the time. Peter Banks ... and we had a violinist, Mike Piggot, and a flautist, and a conga player, and a couple of guitarists apart from Peter. It was all very loose, I mean a lot of us were school friends. I think we are going to be doing something, maybe during the course of making this album, too - because that was around the time I did last year when we were making "Selling England". We're going to go out on the road again with maybe a few more people ... changes, you know what I mean. Int: Who will you have, do you think, this year?
PC: Well I mentioned it to Bill Bruford and he said he would'nt mind having a bash; Steve has mentioned it to John Lord, and he said he wouldn't mind having a bash - so people of that kind from different bands probably. It would be a very sort of loose thing: the only reason behind doing it was just to go on stage and just basically start from scratch, not knowing what you are going to play. We had a couple of songs that we did the first verse of and then played for 20 minutes, and then did a verse to finish with, that kind of thing. It was just an excuse for the musicians in the band to play, and we did two gigs, one at the Tech. College in High Wycombe and the other one at Friars, Aylesbury.
Int: Yes, well that's where I saw it at Friars, Aylesbury.
PC: It was nice playing there, and the people were very nice. Basically it was very self indulgent, and the people - not many of them moved, some of them were, sort of, into it. So it was quite gratifying just to see that they were appreciating the idea behind doing it. It wasn't actually to form a band, but just people ... we've stopped playing clubs and that sort of thing ... and if I can get people in the same frame of mind to actually just go back and keep it very loose and have a good time. Because I'm at home with the arranged things that we do, but sometimes I get a yearning to go on stage and not know what is going to happen - which occasionally, like when the equipment has broken down we've had to improvise things on the spot with various members like me and Steve, or me and Mike and Steve, and they can turn out to be quite fun. The stuff from my new album ... a lot of it is heading that way, towards having a very loose thing to work on, and keeping a lot more for whatever happens on the night - which I think is a lot healthier, especially when you are touring like us tonight ... in very dense passages ... about 9 weeks in America, playing every night - so the freer you can keep it, the better, really.
Int: Well I gather all the band are going to have sort of little outlets. What is Mike going to do?
PC: Well Mike is ... the songs that I did with Mike and Ant were basically the kind of things that they are going to be doing, they have written a lot together since the band split, or since he [Ant] split from the band. There has always been a strong tie there between Mike and Ant and they have always been writing, so this is just going to be ... I'll be singing something, I think.
Int: Now these will be released: so far they are only in tape format?
PC: Yeah, well we made them, probably, the end of last year and it was going to be my single, or we were just going to put it out as *a* single - not who was on it, or who wrote it or anything - nothing special. At the moment, I think it is going to go out under my name, but ... as I say we don't really know when it is coming out yet.
Int: Well we will play ... fortunately you have given us the tapes to play. If you could tell us a bit about the first one anyway, the A side, the "hit" single.
PC: [laughing] The A side, yes? It's a "rock-a-ballad", shall we say. It is called "The Silver Song" and it was written, I believe, around the time when the original drummer, who's name was John Silver, split and there was a bit of depression at the time, because it was the first Genesis, then one of them split - so hence the melencholy words, but it is a nice song.
"Silver Song" is played and there is no more...
David
