When you actually wrote The Gypsy Suite, you've mentioned before that it was concurrent with Tarka Did one influence the other or did they both evolve separately?
No, although there were phases where we were working on guitar parts where we could just switch from one project to the other. As you probably know from the sleeve notes, Gypsy Suite did actually precede Tarka, by a long time. It was written not long after leaving Genesis really. During the summer of 1971 we started kicking all those ideas around and I'd really got a lot of the basic stuff written. Then Harry disappeared and I didn't see him that much really before '75. We did more on Tarka because there was the film coming up, with the prospect of the score and so Gypsy Suite stayed in the background but then between '75 and '76 we did develop the fourth movement. I used to go down to his father's house in Oxes Cross and that's where I met his father. I was introduced to him I think it must have been as Anthony and he said to me with a totally deadpan expression; 'Well, of course, you died at the battle of Actium', which is something from Anthony and Cleopatra and it was a strange introduction !!(laughter). How do you follow that? He was quite eccentric by that stage and it was a quite primitive living style, although the house was quite nice it was never really properly furnished and it had logfires which is quite nice. However, although I'm very sort of game for the striding over headlands sort of thing but when I come back I quite like the mod cons actually. I love looking at fires but I've never been particularly good at making them, whereas Harry was into a basic rough way of life.
In fact he was probably an early Traveller. He had this painted van when I was still living at Send and Harry used to come and park the van in the road outside and in those days it was pretty tricky stuff. It was a big removal van all painted very hippy-ish; a classic hippy thing and it was not to my father's taste. My father's fairly conventional and he must have been a bit worried by it but Harry was very alternative really. This meant that there was a little bit of tension really because his lifestyle was very different to mine which was very safe and, of course, by this time I had the cricket team and most of my friends were sort of ordinary middle class blokes really. Not rip snorters or anything, just good solid lads and Harry was mixing with a very different sort of people. He was mixing with some rather odd people and I'd occasionally go up to London for an evening to develop things and you'd never meet in a sort of normal flat but you'd end up in some sort of squat in King's Cross or somewhere like that, full of strange dwarf looking guys with wild expressions (laughter) and that made me feel very, in inverted commas, "Straight" and I don't think I was but it was probably because Harry was so much the other way. So, we were never quite in tune in that respect but I very much enjoyed being in Devon and going for walks and that was stimulating stuff with the creativity of the music. There was something kind of right about that; the earthy kind of quality to it, particularly on Gypsy Suite. We were in Tarka country so that made sense with acoustic music and also Gypsy Suite with that sort of campfire approach, the very earthy wooden, natural sort of thing so that made sense and I think it helped doing it in those kind of surroundings Peter Cross came down and didn't last a week, he only lasted a day or two and he was straight back on the train (laughter) he was much more into creature comforts than I was!
Did you have the idea of that particular scenario in mind as you were writing or did it come after wards?
No, not really. I don't think we did actually. Part of the last movement really came together in the summer of '71 I think when I'd been starting piano lessons and I'd just begun to get to grips with that. I got very depressed at that point trying to read music and I was also trying to start a lot more guitar writing but it was all very insular stuff. It was my first co-writing after leaving Genesis you see, after about a year of locking myself away during which time I'd learned how to play the piano. So it was actually very exciting and refreshing and Harry knew a lot more about classical music than I did; being a chorister and there were no boundaries, no barriers really. I just picked up from the twelve string stuff that I'd been doing with Mike and just went for some even stranger tunings and it was wonderful exploratory stuff and nobody was saying; 'You should do this, you shouldn't do that' and there's a great deal to be said for not being involved in art in any commercial money level because it inevitably, in some way, does influence how you write things. What we were doing then was something that had absolutely nothing at all to do with money at all. We were doing exactly what we liked and if people didn't like what we were doing, we didn't care at all. Obviously we were hoping that the noises we were making people would like but initially, we had to like it ourselves and at end of the day I think that is the most important thing. If you're too worried about what people might think then you're more likely to come up with a facsimile of something that's gone before; something that may not have any great lasting power. I'm not pretending for a moment that Gypsy Suite will have any great durability but I do think that it does help a hell of a lot if you don't have to start worrying about commercial considerations I think we just followed our noses really. We didn't write to any form although Genesis didn't really write to any form either; there was no verse chorus stuff with many of those pieces and there was no sort of classical form. We weren't trying to write in that way either because there were no holds barred not only in terms of the style of music but in terms of the sound as well and that was exciting. The only problem was when we reached a point where we thought; 'What do we do with this..?' It's funny now with all these small independent companies one tends to take it for granted that you can have a CD out very quickly but in those days it was very different; there was you writing the music, and there was this HUGE edifice, this grey wall that was the record company and the listening public were miles beyond it so we sort of drew a blank really and left it really for dead.
Is that why the fourth movement was written so much later than the first three?
I think so, yes. We didn't know what to do really. No record company would have been interested in it at the time, it was probably too rough, it wasn't fully formed. You have to remember that Genesis were still at that time very small and there wasn't a lot of that kind of music being done, the sort of rock / classical thing with all these things influencing it. It just wasn't being done and people didn't know that much about it. In the meantime I studied and Harry went off to do various things. Then we did Tarka and just got together and did the fourth movement which is probably more exciting than the rest of it. We were still convinced that we wanted to do it with other players and I thought it would sound great with a gypsy violinist because it had this whole campfire approach and I still would really like to try it with that original concept some day. So that was when we went to Simon Draper Summer of 1976 and he liked it, and he would have put it out but we were convinced that it would have to have the other instruments. We were convinced it didn't stand by itself and I can't think now why we did turn him down actually; there was nothing else on offer. They had turned down The Geese & The Ghost and it's funny looking back on these things but at the time I was convinced that The Geese & The Ghost was a dead duck! And I was having to accept that it was a waste of two years' work and it was quite difficult to reconcile yourself to a situation that was like one where you'd been writing a novel for two years and to have people saying, 'this is great; why hasn't it come out..?' and others saying that it wasn't worthwhile and you never knew what people were really thinking and you had to sort of forget it but it was difficult. We were convinced that it had to be done that way and effectively forgot it and went home (laughter). We carried on doing some demos on Tarka I think that is some of the other material that appears on The Gypsy Suite CD. Then we just forgot about it really. We didn't re-demo it until 1978 by which stage we'd done all the proper recording of Tarka with the orchestral stuff which was supposed to get us the score for the film. We did try and we did experiment with a violinist and a cello player. In fact, there are versions of parts of The Gypsy Suite with Rob Phillips and John Hackett playing oboe and flute but it didn't really work. It worked in bits and it needed to be properly worked out but of course, time meant money with these players. I'd still love to hear it with a demon gypsy violinist but then Harry used the piece of music in another context (Battle of the Birds) and put people on top and, as we know, it worked in places and not in others. Something like that has go to be worked out terribly carefully. A lot of it is very 'guitaristic' as they say, and that doesn't always work when they're written, or you have to modify the guitar parts and it needed a lot of thought. And of course, with Harry being in Australia, it didn't really seem as if any of that was possible now hence releasing it, somewhat slightly against my better judgment. It was deemed that the demos were good enough; the recording quality was OK and the mistakes were minimal. Harry did a very good job on the mastering and so there you have it, the Gypsy Suite is now available.
Indeed, there you do have it; a frank insight into the background to this project. I hope that you found it interesting. As usual, my thanks to Anthony for taking the time to talk at such length about the album.
The Pavilion is printed 2 times per year at a price of 5 pounds for people in the UK and Europe, and a price of 6 pounds everywhere else. What you must be careful about is the fact that any check "MUST be drawn on a UK bank draft and payable in pounds sterling" As I have noted before, you would probably be better off by getting pounds in cash form, concealing them well, and sending them by insured mail.
The address is;
Alan Hewitt, 174 Salisbury Road, Everton, Liverpool
L5 6RQ England
I'll have some more articles later.
-Bill