Malcolm Galloway is a former neuropathologist who took medical retirement due to the chronic condition Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. He is lead singer, guitarist and songwriter of the prog rock band Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, who have released seven studio albums, with another one on the way. The band is based in London, and was formed by Galloway and Mark Gatland who have been playing together since school. They are sometimes joined by Galloway’s wife Kathryn Thomas on flute.
In the second part of this in-depth interview, Galloway talks about the band’s sound, writing instrumentals, the forthcoming album The Uncertainty Principle, and future plans for the band.
The first part of this interview can be found here
The Hats Off sound
Nick Holmes Music: What’s unique about the Hats Off sound? Rather than trying to categorise the sound within a genre, what makes it uniquely your band?
I don’t know. I do find that a bit confusing. For example we play at quite a wide variety of different kind of events, from heavy metal events to Prog festivals, or to art galleries for the more instrumental side of what we do. Some songs might be just me and a piano and nothing else, and others, you know, 110 tracks of dense instrumentation.
But in terms of the thing that makes it you, I mean there might be certain harmonic habits, I suppose. I tend to like suspended seconds quite a lot!
Nick Holmes Music: Is there a guiding principle? Is there something you’re aiming at each time you start writing?
No, it evolves. We hope each song stands up in its own right as well, but each song is intended to serve the album as an overall experience. Even acknowledging that people don’t necessarily often listen to albums in that way, but in in terms of the architecture of the of how it’s produced.
Nick Holmes Music: Would you ever drop a song because it’s a good song, but it doesn’t fit in the musical/conceptual argument of the album?
Yes. So for each of our albums so far, I think we’ve had more material than we could fit onto the album. I’m not saying there necessarily is an objective way of judging a best song, but it’s not just a question of, ‘we like this song.’ It’s about the shape of the album, and if it doesn’t serve the intended purpose at that place in the album, then we won’t include it. It might then come into a later album, or it might get released separately or become a B-side.
We have a stack of ideas that didn’t fit a particular album, but were written at the same time, and I’m usually working on multiple projects at a time. Even at the moment, I’m working on album number eight, but I’ve also been exploring ideas for the next one as well.
Nick Holmes Music: Do you sometimes find you have to challenge yourself because it’s very easy to fall back on things that you’re comfortable with? Or are you happy to use those as building blocks, because you know they work?
I’m not sure. I suppose sometimes there’s a song, and you really like it and it’s really simple. I feel a bit uncomfortable releasing that because it’s so simple it must have been done before because it seems really obvious. And then I play it to various people and I think, ‘where have I stolen this from?’ – accidentally, I don’t deliberately steal. And Mark [Gatland] is fairly encyclopaedic in his knowledge of popular music. If he doesn’t recognise it, then it’s probably just that there are certain shapes of phrases that are fairly ubiquitous, but not necessarily somebody else’s.
Nick Holmes Music: Do you ever think it would be nice to write prog rock in strange time signatures such as7/8 or 14/16? Or do you just find yourself writing something and thinking, ‘That’s not in the standard 4/4?’
Usually it’s a question of writing something that feels right for the theme that we’re aiming for and then if that isn’t 4/4, that’s fine. I don’t think we would start being like ‘Oh, I’d really like to write a piece in 17/8 or whatever. But it might be, ‘This is an interesting rhythmic pattern.’ And then exploring that and sometimes the rhythmic pattern might come from a phrase, like in listening to an audio book. And there’s a certain rhythm to a phrase or a certain sense of a melody in a phrase, and that will set off an idea for a song. That’s more often how it would be rather than starting off as an exercise, ‘I want to write a canon’ or whatever.
Nick Holmes Music: So the kind of thing that Steve Reich was doing on Different Trains, using speech rhythms and then feeding them into a musical idea?
I think so, and Steve Reich is a big influence on me.
Nick Holmes Music: So does your classical knowledge and interest feed into your rock writing?
I used to think that they were very separate, but then it was pointed out to me that actually there was quite a lot of overlap. And as [the band’s] albums have developed, there’s become more and more overlap. Not necessarily in the ‘songy’ bits, but particularly in the instrumental parts.
Nick Holmes Music: So how would you know whether something that you’re working on, an idea that comes to your head, is going on a minimalist album in your own name, or it’s going to go on a Hats Off album?
If it’s short, it’ll probably be one of the burbly bits between the songs on a Hats Off album! If it’s – like when we were talking about Steve Reich – a rigorously worked out overlapping repeated pattern, developing emergent phase properties over 50 minutes or so, then it’ll probably fit better on one of my solo albums.
So far none of my solo ones, which have been my classical stuff, have had anything that involved singing. If it’s got drums, it’s more likely also to be Hats Off. But I think a lot of it’s just the length!
Vasily Arkhipov: A human dilemma
Nick Holmes Music: On your recent single, One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov), you’re very much in the moment trying to address the human dilemma?
We tend to focus on a character and the dilemma they’re facing at that moment, and what they’re going through. So to me, the story of Vasily Arkhipov is fascinating, this Soviet submariner who had previously been involved in another submarine disaster where the crew had been exposed to a great deal of radiation and many of them ended up dying of cancer.
During the Cuban missile crisis, their submarine was under water, [with] no contact with Moscow. There was a group of America warships. There were depth charges being dropped. It’s said that the Americans were intending to signal to them that they’d been found, and to come up, rather than necessarily intending to sink them. But from their perspective, they were deep under water, cut off from everything, and with explosions going on around them.
And the captain of the sub thought that World War III may have started, and in that situation they’re meant to fire their nuclear torpedo. Normally it would be the First and Second in command on the submarine who would be making that decision and it had to be unanimous. The number one and two on the submarine had decided to fire, but by chance Arkhipov, who was a senior person on the whole fleet of submarines, was on that particular submarine. He also, because of his position, had a veto and he refused.
They tried to argue him round, but they didn’t. But the whole sense of what it might be like to be that person, that minority opinion, when the machinery that kept the air breathable was failing, so carbon dioxide was rising. It was very hot and high levels of CO2 are a really unpleasant feeling. It feels like you’re suffocating, it induces a feeling of panic. And in that situation, he was one person who kept his head and stuck to his decision. And it may well be because of that, that we didn’t end up so far with the Third World War. So it’s frightening in terms of how close it was.
I also know that my aesthetic leans towards the dark but on the other hand, I also like our songs to have an element of hope and human choice and consequence. So there’s somebody in an awful situation, but that made a hugely significant positive decision.
The New Album – The Uncertainty Principle
Nick Holmes Music: You’re working on a new album. Does it have a title yet?
At the moment it’s The Uncertainty Principle.
Nick Holmes Music: Are you going to stick with that, do you think?
I suspect we will, unless something better crops up between now and then.
Nick Holmes Music: For a non-scientific person, what is The Uncertainty Principle?
I’m not a physicist. I enjoy ‘popular science’ physics, but I’m not claiming to have a very great mathematical expertise.
For a big chunk of human history, cause and effect was gods making things happen. We couldn’t understand or predict, ‘why has this crop failed?’ Well, there’s some supernatural explanation. Then you had the Enlightenment as we started to get more of a scientific approach to understand, ‘Here’s an effect, and now we’re looking at what was the cause of it. Oh well, it’s because of this weevil, that’s infested the grain, or this is what’s happened in terms of the climate.’
You have the Newtonian world where if you imagine every particle in the universe, in theory, if you knew where every particle was and where it was moving, how fast, you could work your way back, if you had sufficiently good computers and maths, and work out the state of the universe at any point in the past or future. At that time, there wasn’t that great accuracy in the scientific measurements. The tools were limited, but as they improved with microscopes and telescopes, we got more precise understanding of the universe, and I think most scientists thought that as time went on, we’d get more and more this dream of limitless precision.
But with quantum physics, Heisenberg showed that the more precisely you know one thing about a particle, the less you know about another aspect of it. So then we’re talking about momentum and position, it’s not true that you could just get better and better microscopes, and so you would know more and more detail about where this particular particle is and what it’s doing. Actually, at a fundamental level there is uncertainty in the universe. It’s not that we are uncertain how we measure things, it’s not the failing of the technology. It’s actually a fundamental aspect that the universe appears to be built from randomness – there are random elements underlying reality. We then play with that in a metaphorical sense, maybe a little bit superficially!
In my medical work, one of the major reasons for medical errors is excessive certainty, when somebody is really certain they know what is going on with somebody and actually their knowledge is wrong. Being excessively certain can be very dangerous, and that could be true in medicine, in politics, in wars. I think certainty is an underappreciated danger. You know, people are always being told ‘Oh, you’ve got to be really confident and certain of everything.’ Actually, being able to acknowledge, ‘well, this is what I think but I don’t know’, I think is a really valuable skill.
Nick Holmes Music: So does this feed back into the concept of the previous album The Confidence Trick (2022)?
It does link into the idea of people being excessively confident and certain of themselves and harming other people through it. Often, unfortunately, the people who are very confident do very well on a personal level, but while harming those around them. Other people who are very confident are certain that when they send people into wars that it’s going to be easy and glorious, but it’s not them going and fighting and dying. It’s just a common theme throughout the history and science and medicine.
Nick Holmes Music: Is it something that you’ve researched specifically?
I used to do research and teach about overconfidence and excessive certainty in medicine, in diagnosis. One of the key things I used to try and teach was pause to every so often and think, ‘Why might I be wrong?’ We tend to always look for evidence that supports our existing beliefs. It’s much more difficult because it’s so counterintuitive – we want to be told. We want to find reasons that we are right. But it’s an important mental discipline to be thinking, particularly with high stakes decisions, ‘OK, well, why might I be wrong?’ And I think that happens too infrequently in public life.
Nick Holmes Music: And for the new album, can you say how that feeds into the songs?
We used to believe in cause and effect, so one of the issues at a quantum scale is that cause and effect are not as obvious as they seem to be in the macroscopic world. We used to believe in certainty. So the first song explores that the historical setting of humanity coming across the idea that actually we can’t be certain, not just because we aren’t yet good enough technologically, but actually because it’s a fundamental part of reality, that certainty is impossible.
We’ve got a song relating to the famous meeting between Heisenberg and his former mentor Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. I don’t know if you come across the play, Copenhagen?
Nick Holmes Music: No, tell me about that.
Heisenberg was a very significant physicist who developed many of the most significant ideas in quantum physics, and he was working on the German side in WW II, and he was leading their nuclear research programme. He used to work closely with [Danish physicist] Niels Bohr, who was in an occupied country, and they had a meeting during the War and they both recall the contents of this meeting very differently.
What they say about what they thought the other person was meaning differs greatly. Heisenberg was quite ambiguous even after the War about what his role was and what his intentions were. Some people have argued, did he deliberately slow the Germans down? He did make an error in a calculation which may have helped persuade them not to pursue a nuclear bomb very vigorously. Others argue that they were not in a good position to be doing that anyway.
After the War, many of the German scientists were kept in an environment where they were bugged, and their conversations were transcribed, and they can be read now online. But again, these were bright people. Were they saying what they were saying because they knew they were being bugged, or were they talking openly?
There’s all these multiple reflected layers of what this person is thinking about, what that person’s thinking about, what they think the other person’s thinking… the idea of never being able to be certain what’s in another person’s mind. There’s a debate about was Heisenberg trying to get information to the Allies via his old friend, or was he trying to get his old friend to help in making a bomb for the Germans?
It is very ambiguous. There isn’t a clear answer, I don’t think, at the end. We don’t know for certain. We might have a gut instinct, but we can never know for certain what’s in somebody else’s head. And that’s just, I thought, a really nice example of two people who really developed the concept of the Uncertainty Principle.
Then we’ve got a story from the perspective of Moe Berg, an American baseball player who became an American spy who was sent to watch a lecture given by Heisenberg during the War, in Switzerland, armed with the idea that if he thought he was close to developing a nuclear bomb to assassinate him. Again, that explores that theme of how we know what somebody else’s intentions are on this limited evidence. This person being in this situation of having to make that kind of potentially momentous decision.
If it had been that Heisenberg was deliberately slowing down the Nazi bomb, then assassinating him could have been very counterproductive. On the other hand, it could have been the other way around, and it turns out that the War was coming to an end anyway, but the people at the time didn’t necessarily know that. It’s just another interesting example of the uncertainty playing out in interpersonal relationships amongst people for whom the concept of uncertainty had been a big part of their intellectual life. So that’s what appealed to me with that aspect of the story.
Instrumentals
Nick Holmes Music: I’d like to ask you about the instrumentals on your albums. Sometimes they are just used as an interlude to cleanse the palate before you go on to the next track. Do you see instrumentals as part of the fabric of the concept?
Usually our albums are about 50:50 instrumental and vocal tracks, and then in our live gigs we do the vocal stuff live. The instrumental tracks usually aren’t directly narrative. We have got a couple of examples of things that are fairly old fashioned, traditional programme music in the kind of Berlioz-type way.
We did a piece [Ark] about the history of the Ark Royal my grandad served on, and that one very much does follow the story. He was on the planes on the aircraft carrier. You’ve got bits of the music where it’s combat, and bits where it’s tensely waiting while you’re being hunted. In terms of classical music, I’m not saying there’s anything very original in that. I mean, that’s been a very standard thing in Classical music since the 1850s.
And there’s another piece called Refuge, which is about my great grandmother on my mum’s side, escaping from multiple pogroms in different parts of Europe and then hiding, being protected by a village in the Pyrenees during WWII. That one does have very programmatic elements. You’ve got things that sound a bit like a train, and the music directly reflecting episodes in a story.
On the other hand, most of our instrumental stuff is more non programmatic. It reflects a feel or a mood, or might be bringing up or bringing down an energy between two different tracks, and sometimes an interlude. Sometimes you’ve had fairly intense vocal track and you want to give people a bit of a breather before the next angsty screeching!
Nick Holmes Music: What’s coming up for Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate?
We’ll also be releasing Copenhagen as a single, the song about the disputed conversation between the physicists Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941.
We’ve got one or two more vocal recording sessions for the new album and a flute recording session to do, and then finishing off, mixing, mastering and the booklet. We put quite a lot of effort into all the packaging and the booklets. We try and give quite a lot of explanation of what the ideas were behind the albums.
Nick Holmes Music: You have been moving away from flutes, certainly on the last album, but are you moving back into collaboration a bit more with your wife [the flute-player Kathryn Thomas]?
I love her contribution to the albums. It’s a question of what she’s happy to do, as she is busy with her own work as a classical musician. It’s also a question of what serves a particular song and album and theme. There is a particularly chunky flute part to come on the next album.
Nick Holmes Music: And what about live shows? What’s coming up?
Our next gig is Prog For Peart in Abingdon, which raises funds for brain tumour research, on 13 July. Then we’ll be giving a joint headline show with EBB at the Camden Club on 22 July. We’re looking forward to Danfest in Leicester on 22 November.
We co-organise – with Chris Parkins/London Prog Gigs – an environmental charity fundraiser, Prog The Forest, which is in Camden on 1 December. I’m delighted that we’ll be joined by Tim Bowness and the Butterfly Mind, Theo Travis, Leoni Jane Kennedy, Mountainscape, The Mighty Handful, and Spriggan Mist.
On 29 December we’ll be playing I think our first show in Essex, with The Round Window, in Colchester.
I also do some solo shows, either with acoustic or electric guitar, or with keyboard. I’ll be playing a solo set at the Fiddler’s Elbow on 26 September. I’ll also be hosting an event -details to be announced – at the next Hard Rock Hell Prog festival in October.
Shows in 2024
Saturday 13 July: Abingdon – Prog For Peart, with IO EARTH, Comedy Of Errors, Sonic Tapestry, League of Lights, Tribe3, Forgotten Gods
Monday 22 July: The Camden Club, Camden, with EBB
Thursday 26 September: The Fiddler’s Elbow – Camden, Discover Unsigned Showcase – Malcolm Galloway solo set
Friday 18 October: Party at HRH Prog, details TBC
Friday 22 November: Leicester – Danfest, with The Hayley Griffiths Band and Candacraig
Sun 1 December: The Fiddler’s Elbow – Camden, Prog The Forest. With Tim Bowness and the Butterfly Mind, Theo Travis, Leoni Jane Kennedy, Mountainscape, The Mighty Handful, and Spriggan Mist
Sun 29 December: Three Wise Monkeys, Colchester, Essex – with The Round Window
Shows in 2025
Tuesday 18 Feb 2025: The 1865, Southampton – with The Lee Abraham Band
The first part of the interview can be found here
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