Last month Richard Elen found out about solo artist Richard Harvey's past career with the indefinable Gryphon. But even before the band passed away, Richard had a lot of other work in the form of a solo classical recorder LP and a jingle-writing contract with Air-Edel. This month, Richard talks about the art of the jingle, and his forthcoming solo LP based on the idea of the four seasons.

RH: I'd got a deal with Air Edel between the second and third albums, and there was already an imbalance there because I could make money from music doing that and the rest of the band couldn't. My first job was a year in coming, and then a year after that it all happened. I regard jingles in a special light. They've made a lot of things possible: money to buy instruments, which are expensive, experience to dabble in all kinds of music imaginable, and use the best session musicians; it's fantastic to be able to work on a trial-and-error basis on a certain musical style, and say well I've got to write a bit of Twenties stuff, I've never done it before, and I've got a really good lineup tomorrow, and if it doesn't work, thirty seconds of music, I can just throw it out, and write another, even on the session. You can get a good end-result and get a lot of experience.

RE: So we come on to where you are now, doing a solo album. I gather you're going to try and get a lease-tape deal.

RH: I'm three-quarters of the way through the backing-tracks at the moment. The idea is that we're putting it down on 16-track, all the things that are going to take the time, and don't need the facilities, then we'll transfer to 24-track, and hopefully go down to Sawmills, and dub on another eight tracks-worth, then mix at a London studio, if budget permits. So far it's my own money. I want a lease-tape deal, partly for my own financial advantage, but partly because by then it's too late. People can't fiddle around. I'd much rather present a fait accompli. I'd much rather work that way, and it'll set a precedent. Various companies are keen, but they're waiting to hear rough mixes of backing tracks.

This album is a very important thing for me. I've had it in my mind for some time, ever since I've considered myself a multi-instrumentalist, so-called. This, I suppose, is more a sort of demonstration of the 'multi-instrumentalist's art, or an attempted one, rather than music for music's sake. I'll have the freedom to do that on subsequent albums. I don't expect to be given a good ride by the rock press, if, indeed, they give me a ride at all! But that's only to be expected. There's obviously a place for the multi-instrumentalist, it's a kind of studio art, really, and there aren't many of us about.

But those that are have done pretty well. I regard the whole setup as like a great big cinema organ: instead of pulling out stops, you just go to a cupboard and pull out a crumhorn, or whatever. It's a way of creating a sound — there's nothing really artificial about it. It's only one stage away from having a different sound on each manual of a Hammond organ. In some ways you can get a greater overall feeling of completeness if one person has played everything. Also, I want to get back on the road, and as there's no chance of that at the moment, it's a good time to do the album. If this album sells, I'll undoubtedly get a few concerts together, though. A little fifteen-piece band.

RE: What's the album about?

RH: Well I'm a bit shy of the old 'concept', particularly with instrumental music. In a sense I loathe the vocal concept album, but an instrumental album is much more a 'song without words', or 'mind-ballet'. People have got to imagine what they will. You can implant little seeds, but really they've got to make what they can of the music. In the overall sense, the album is a year, and there'll be various elemental things, a thunderstorm, a bit of weather, odds and sods, a dawn chorus, a marketplace section; and it ends with a quiet sequence. It's a natural sequence, one that fits an instrumental album very well, I think. It'll have a three minute chunk at either end, prologue and epilogue, and rest is a single lump.

RE: Will there be a single?

RH: I think one'll have to come out. But it'll be the sort of thing BBC2 play before they close down, or Capital will play when they've got 50 seconds to the news. A single just to get a snippet of my music on to the mass airwaves. I would really not be happy with the idea of a single being put out and getting the full treatment because I'm not a singles artist.

RE: What's the instrumentation on the album?

RH: Well, there's five sub-groups of instruments. There's keyboards, guitars, woodwinds, percussion and 'ethnic strings' if you like. Very kindly, Ed at Chappells loaned me zillions of instruments and helped me locate others — he deserves a plug.

The keyboards: there's an electronic pipe-organ, made by Ernest Hart, which is a kind of synthesised pipe organ, really nice, a Minimoog, Roland string synthesiser, Fender Rhodes, a Mellotron, RMI piano, a Clavinet, Baldwin electric harpsichord, a keyboard glockenspiel, an electric harmonium, and a grand piano; and there will be in addition to that, an acoustic harpsichord and ARP Odyssey, because there's some sounds I can't get from the Moog, and I like the sample-and-hold.

The guitar department: six-string electric is a Pete Redding SG, with two humbuckers and a DiMarzio pickup, Ibanez Artist 12-string electric, Zemaitis jumbo 12-string acoustic, an Aria six-string acoustic, an anonymous Japanese nylon-string acoustic; three basses: a Fender Telecaster bass with a DiMarzio Precision pickup put on by the bridge, a Pete Redding custom bass with Gibson pickups, long-scale, and a Precision fretless. And there's a CSL Maccaferri, with D-shaped sound hole and cutaway, à la Django Reinhardt.

The 'ethnics', which really aren't all that ethnic, I know British people hate to be regarded as ethnic: there's a Celtic harp...

RE: A real Celtic Harp, or a pseudo Celtic Harp?

RH:... Well it's made in France, innit! Made in Normandy, mate! Plus a bowed psaltery, a bouzouki, a Turkish Saz, a Portuguese mandolin, a tenor viol, and an autoharp; I just call them the 'jangle section'.

The percussion: there's a kind of hybrid kit, with a Ludwig kick-drum, Rose-Morris snare that I got for a fiver, Paiste crinkle-cut hi-hat, and a set of Tama concert-toms, various cymbals; then there's a xylophone, bell-tree, sleigh bells, all the Latin American stuff, and bits of wood, bits of metal, that sort of thing, and loads of tambourines.

In the woodwinds, there's clarinet, soprano sax, tenor sax, all Yamaha, and very nice; about 28 recorders ranging from a sub-contra-bass which stands about three inches taller than I do, about 6ft 1in, down to the Garklein Flotlein, which is about the size of a ballpoint. It's about six inches long and I can barely get my fingers round it! Several descant recorders of a Renaissance and Baroque quality, tenor, bass and all the different sizes...

RE: A full consort.

RH: Plus a rather innovative German metal recorder that weighs a ton, and sounds like a trumpet. A couple of crumhorns, bass and soprano, a tenor cornamuse, which is a 'straight' crumhorn, two sets of pan-pipes, a French Syrinx set and a Rumanian curved set, various tin-whistles, and a tabor-pipe, which is for playing full melodies with one hand — it has three finger-holes, you start off a scale on those, then you overblow and it goes up a fifth, so you get quite a range; it uses harmonics. The idea is that you sling a little drum — a tabor — over your wrist and play it with your other hand. Then there's various bamboo flutes, and a South American square flute and a couple of ocarinas. There might be several other Renaissance instruments used eventually, like the cornett, rauschpfeiffe, shawm, and so on. A shawm especially if I can get one loud enough to echo back from the valley at Sawmills.

RE: Then you're using some rather special effects with your Otari |in 8-track.

RH: Yes, the 8-track is being used as a kind of mellotron. We made loops on it and played the faders like a keyboard. So for most of my harmony vocal things, I've had the eight notes of the scale of C on it, plus all the accidentals going on two Revoxes and a Studer. So we can play all the chords on the vocals faders. And, though I don't like drum machines, I sometimes like the relentlessness of them, so we've made quite a few loops of weird percussion things and been able to mix them after we've looped them, which is very useful.

We've also started recording my voice at 3¾in/s and playing it back at 30in/s to imitate birdsong. We slowed a couple of BBC effects records down by exactly the same amount, and it all comes out at a lowish vocal pitch, and you can more or less exactly emulate it; it works, and it's amazingly convincing, and to be able to get a bird noise without tape-hiss and traffic noise and so on, is really rather good.

If you count drums and percussion as one thing, there's only about 68 instruments on this album. But if you actually count all the individual instruments, there's about 130, 140.

RE: Do you ever feel that you may be letting yourself down where you aren't quite so proficient; I mean you aren't as good on drums as you are on recorder, for instance.

RH: Of course that's true, but this is my first solo album. Jingles don't let you find out your limitations, but I really am learning them now. But anything's possible. I mean, some rock singers, with studio techniques, can actually sound as if they can sing; so I should be able to get by on my drums with a few handy dropins. It's alright, because I don't do flash virtuoso bits on, say, drums, or harp, that I'm not so familiar with. I do them on clarinet, or synthesiser, or recorder or something. But I'm doing what I always wanted to do in Gryphon, which is to create textures. For instance there's a little mediaeval-type track that's going on very near the start of the album, and there's a section where there's two 12-string acoustics, a phased accordion, two Minimoogs, a Saz, bouzouki, Portuguese guitar, and a couple of crumhorns. Now I know for a fact that that sound has never existed before. It is a very individual sound, and for me, that's real creativity. Because I think that the one area that composers have ignored is sound quality, just creating new sounds. They still stick with viola, and piano, and oboe, and that lot, they can't see beyond that. Some of them might get adventurous and start playing piano strings with a plectrum...

RE: And tape loops on oboes...

RH: Yes, and smashing expensive flutes with sledgehammers... but that's not really about creating nice sounds, that's about making a nuisance of yourself.

RE: Do you think that music is necessarily about producing things that sound 'nice' — is there a place for music that sounds horrible and nasty, if it's there for a purpose, rather than just to be trendy? Say you wanted to produce a heavy emotion, would you be tempted to use something that was heavy, discordant...? Deliberately not pretty, nice...?

RH: Yes, I think there's plenty of room for that, and sometimes I do want to create evil, ominous-sounding things, warlike... But my real notion, as applied only to myself, is that I don't want to reflect life as it is now in my music. There's plenty of people doing that. And doing it very well, and it's not what I want. I want to create a new kind of world, a kind of escapism. Therefore, within that framework, if I get aggressive, there's always going to be an equal and opposite reaction. Because in fairyland, there's always a happy ending, that sort of thing.

RE: You're very much into producing something that's uplifting and positive, not too tied up with the nasty, evil side of reality; more hopeful, perhaps, like maybe Close Encounters compared with The Exorcist? I'd go along with that.

RH: The music that's too realistic... that's the area that most rock bands work in; the Stones, The Clash... Tom Robinson...

RE: Is that realism?

RH: No, but it's the kind of realism people want, packaged up...

RE: Pseudo-realism?

RH: Yes, no-one's ever really released realism, it's always packaged up so people find it acceptable.

RE: Or it can be packaged by virtue of it's non-acceptability — I think a lot of punk's like that.

RH: Oh, sure, it's very chic, and very...

RE: Nasty? So appallingly nasty that it must be good! Bad taste is good sales.

RH: That's right. But mind you, even that's shot its lot now. Short of somebody throwing up over Richard Baker on the News it's all been done. People have shown their organs to people, peed in Broadcasting House, all those kind of things. There's not much left to do now. Except chundering on Dickie Baker. And somebody'll do that, and that'll be the closed book. Then we'll get back to what it's all about.

RE: Real music?

RH: Yeah. That's what we're all doing, isn't it. I may well not become a millionaire but I'm sure I'll be able to look back in decrepit old age at some nice albums. That's my real aspiration.

RE: As far as good music's concerned, you've got a pretty good track record.

RH: I've got a long way to go. I'm learning all the time.

RE: How are you learning?

RH: Oh, by bitter, bitter experience. I'm finding out that you've got to allow yourself room to move. At one stage I threw myself in headlong, thinking that the best way to write was just to keep writing. All the time. I took on a library album for KPM, I was doing lots of jingles, and I was preparing for this one. My mind eventually would not let me move to music, after a time. I'd sit at the piano, and my hands would know where the chord of E flat was, but only my fingers were moving. I wasn't playing anything worth listening to. I was thinking about other things, the Test Match, dinner, all those kinds of things that aren't on if you're to compose a major work. My mind said, 'You will go out, you will play snooker, you will get drunk, tomorrow you'll stay in bed, you'll not trouble me with thoughts of music for another week.' I had to take ten days off in the middle of this album: my mind wouldn't let me work, full of energy and will though I was. But sometimes writing is a joy. Like with jingles, someone says you've got until tomorrow to get a master. You can throw yourself headlong into it, and if it doesn't work they tell you it doesn't matter, it was a bit too much to ask anyway. But usually they like it. You've knocked something up, it's simple, a bit catchy, and... fun.

RE: You're writing within a format, with library music or a jingle, aren't you. You're writing to a brief. Does that help you focus your mind?

RH: Well you've got to do it yourself if no-one else will. Like a novelist won't just sit down and write, but will plan the book out first. You've got to be an architect before you can be a builder when you're writing music.

RE: That's a good line.

RH: But it's true. You can't just sit in front of a pile of manuscript paper. You produce a structure, then you fill in the gaps.

RE: Do you think the library/jingles business is a good one for musicians to get into?

RH: A lot are getting into it, not just because they have to. It's essential bread and butter, the only way that professional vocational musicians can keep themselves going. Some people try a rock band, fail, then get another job. But a truly professional musician, who will always be a musician, will always be finding ways to stop the mind going stale, and keeping the pennies coming in. I mean, I love playing lots of musical instruments. Musical instruments don't grow on trees, they're extremely expensive. You've got to have the funds.

RE: Some people, like say Keith Mansfield, actively use library music as a kind of experimentation, and discipline...

RH: I do. My library album gave me a huge amount of confidence, working under those kind of pressures; there's bound to be weak patches, but it was a great booster to me to be sure that I could do it. Like one of the nicest tracks, I just put down some piano chords, then took the sax into the control room and blew till a nice tune came out.

RE: What direction do you see yourself as heading? Or do you just see yourself as broadening your horizons and finding out?

RH: I hope to be heading in the direction where I'll be able to trust a few people to listen to what I've done after I've done it. That would be a major breakthrough for me, in the business world. They're the gateway to your audience. I want people to be able to say, yes, I know what you do, and have the confidence to let you go on and do it. After this album I want to do more albums in the same way, but I want them to crystallise into a more clear mood. There's so much in this album, it'll be a real 'Jamboree Bag', you know. I'd like to write an album that's less frenzied, more linear, and smooth. Where I don't feel I've got to pull the stops out. I've got to this time, it's like my debut album, I've got to be able to go on Blue Peter, and say yes, I played a hundred and twenty thousand instruments, and a recorder that's four times as tall as I am, harpsichords made out of sticky-backed plastic in one hand, and that sort of thing. I've got to be able to do that because that's how you get publicity. People say, 'Well, Richard, nice to have you on the show, now what is rauschpfeifle? You went to the Royal College of Music, didn't you? Did you meet Rick Wakeman while you were there? How many keyboards do you play?' And that's what it's all about, and I'd much rather not have to do that. I'd love to do an album where I didn't have to put a crumhorn on it.

RE: Unless you wanted to.

RH: Unless I wanted to. A crumhorn is a nice sound, and in its place, sounds terrific; but it's a bit restricting to be doing an album and know I have to put a crumhorn on it somewhere, otherwise I won't get on Blue Peter.

Thus I leave the control room of Riverside Recordings, having heard the odd rough mix, a bizarre percussion tapeloop with organ, a couple of synths and weird vocal noises, and Richard's stunning impression of a nightingale for the Dawn Chorus on the album. I leave him to his overdubs as he starts work adding a Fender piano to a bizarre cacophony of strange sounds, playing multiple-speed triplets as if they were chords of C Major. Ouch! I wish him luck.