Guest
Bill Bruford (album) Talking of audio and visual quality, as I was last week, this one gets an A Star rating. I hardly remember doing this, but the song was doing great business and offers for the band were coming thick and fast. The video takes me back to the days when the label was king, and you more or less did what you were told - that is, if you wanted to be on radio, without which failure was assured. And commercial radio formats had decided in their infinite wisdom that all tracks had to be three or four minutes, until Queen and others broke that door down. If you’ve got to edit the album track for radio and give it this breathless, squashed up feeling, then you could do worse than this. It features the shortest Holdsworth guitar solo ever; now it’s a little gem rather than a big luxurious one. But why does the track sound somehow old-fashioned to me now? So little in the way of dynamics. All the best players are working in a genre that demands dynamics from the drummer to make it happen. Like the conductor, the good drummer toys with light and shade, power and restraint, tension and release, as you do when you’re speaking. Best bit for me here is the dramatic increase in tension as the band comes down in dynamics (a bit) to usher in the soloist. Still, the song did get serious attention on radio and opened a lot of doors for the band. Pity we didn’t walk through them. #billbruford #drummer #UKband #yes #tamadrums #paistecymbals #kingcrimson #rockdrummer #jazzdrummer
