Interview: Malcolm Galloway of Prog Rock Band Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate – Part I

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 Hat’s 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 first part of this in-depth interview, Galloway talks about the band’s unusual name, researching material for his songs, concept albums, and living with chronic pain.

Part II of the interview will be posted shortly…

The Band’s Name

Nick Holmes Music: The first question is about the band’s name. Do you regret it being a slightly flippant, jokey name? I’m thinking really of bands like Porcupine Tree. Steven Wilson started Porcupine Tree as a teenage joke and gave it the name. 

Well, I think there are some fair concerns about the band name. I think it has an element of self-deprecating English humour to it, hopefully, but I chose the name a long time before what the band evolved into, and there’s a danger that it can sound like a comedy band and although I hope our gigs are fun and friendly and inclusive, and the chat between the songs is quite playful, the music itself is often fairly bleak and thematically grim.  

We don’t take ourselves very seriously, but I think we take the music seriously and it’s not a kind of comedy band, which it easily could give the impression of being. So I think that’s a fair question.  

Do I regret it? I imagine people who have to put our band name on festival posters, I’m pretty sure they regret it because it’s very difficult with the number of letters. Either it doesn’t fit on the poster, or it has to be done at such a small font size and nobody can read it. 

On the other hand, there is something about the band name that does feel quite us. Also, we’ve got used to it, so it’s difficult for us to imagine being called something more sensible. 

Nick Holmes Music: So have you ever thought about changing it? 

Not really, although I can see that it could cause confusion. We did get once criticised, ‘You didn’t even bother to dress in a steam punk outfit.’ That’s fine. We’ve got nothing against steampunk, but we’ve never claimed that’s what we are. 

I suppose once you’ve already developed a branding, you’re taking some steps back to then lose that and change it. And some people really like the band name, although it does confuse some people. 

The quote is from what [German composer] Schumann said about [Polish composer and pianist] Chopin, 

“Hats off, gentlemen—a genius!” 

The image I had was these Edwardian gentlemen throwing their hats in the air. Not about something being amazing, but about something being average. And it was just that image that led to the band name.  

Research

Nick Holmes Music: In your previous career as a neuropathologist and a medical tutor you did a lot of research, and your name is on several research papers online. Do you enjoy the research you do for songs for your albums? 

I listen to a lot of audiobooks and quite often a song seems to just jump out from a phrase, or sometimes we’ll start with the theme and then research around the theme.  

So for example, the current album we’re working on relates to the uncertainty principle and the history of quantum physics. I did a lot of listening and reading around that aspect of history and physics. How much of that actually ends up directly in a song, I mean, I suspect it’s maybe like somebody writing a novel who might do a lot of research, which then is helpful for them having in their mind when writing something, rather than necessarily directly contributing to a lyric.  

But I do enjoy that sense of exploring and looking for situations, ideas and bits of history that might turn into songs. It’s a bit of a different process to the medical stuff because there’s much more room for subjectivity in songwriting. I quite like songs as a performer, where it’s from a character’s perspective and I want it to feel like that is genuinely what that character would be thinking or feeling. But their feeling doesn’t necessarily have to be true, they don’t have to be right. Whereas with the medical research, I’d feel a very strong sense of needing it to be accurate and objective because it has real-world consequences. If you put something into the medical literature that’s incorrect, that can affect patient care, which hopefully doesn’t happen so much with the songwriting. 

Nick Holmes Music: So your research isn’t peer reviewed, except by your band mate Mark Gatland? 

We will talk through the ideas for songs, but the research is an inspiration. If I was writing an academic article, I’d feel the need to cover all the evidence for and against and weigh it up. Whereas in the song you can take the perspective of a character and you don’t have to be so balanced.

Concepts

Nick Holmes Music: Do you always start with the concept when you’re writing a new album? Does the music come first or is it organic?  

It’s a mixture. The first one we did, Invisible (2012), the theme of that was about invisible disabilities. And that was very much influenced by my experience of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and coming to terms with a changing life because of the chronic pain associated with that.  

It’s not a concept of in terms of directly telling a story, but it’s aimed at having an arc emotionally in terms of the response to that situation. I think most of the songs for that album I’d written separately, but they felt like they came together under that theme. 

Our second album When the Kill Code Fails (2016), follows a story about a virus that has been created by an employee of a security service. The virus is supposed to have had a kill-switch built into it, so that it can be controlled. The former hacker who created the virus wasn’t entirely honest with his employer, with the intention of blackmailing them. He dies during interrogation,  leaving an out of control virus threatening any infrastructure dependent on networked computers. The album opens with an official begging for help from an experimental artificial intelligence, which turns out to be quite benevolent. It agrees to help in exchange for being freed from its virtual confinement.

Apart from the opening song, the album follows the story, rather than directly trying to tell the story. I hope being aware of the story might be of interest to listeners, without being essential to enjoying the music.

The story helps when I’m writing in terms of giving me a sense of what shape I’m aiming towards. With the concept albums I’m very happy if people want to engage with the theme and the concept. They may get something more out of it if they do, but it’s also fine if they don’t. I think the primary beneficiary of the concept is me when I’m writing it because it helps me structure what I’m trying to do. 

Then the third one, Broken but Still Standing (2017, that very much had a sort of chronological narrative of following human evolution basically from the bottom of the ocean by the thermal geothermal vents through the boring billions of years when life was just slime before it got round to doing anything very interesting, and particularly focusing on evolution. When we think of evolution, it’s often thought of in terms of competition, which is biologically important, but sometimes the importance of cooperation as a technology is underappreciated.  

So when we went from being slime to being multicellular organisms, that was only possible because two completely different organisms ended up becoming symbiotically dependent on each other. And then later on, when we go from being individuals to being communities and allowing subspecialisation within human communities, a similar kind of concept to what happened in the development of multicellular organisms.  

And that album carries on into a sort of posthuman future where you’ve got symbiosis between machines and the humans. And so it’s basically going on that arc, not necessarily in as depressing away as we might have expected from most of our stuff. 

Nick Holmes Music: Do you find it hard to remove your scientific hat? 

I would find it hard to put in a lyric something that I knew was scientifically untrue, or some of our historically related songs… If I was writing just text, I would have lots of footnotes and clarifications, which doesn’t really flow as a lyric. So I realise that we do have to simplify a narrative for a song. Or at least we may want or allow a certain ambiguity that you may not want in a more academic context.  

There is a tension between the artistic and the academic. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in something that portrayed itself as a historical or scientifically themed song to write anything that was actively untrue, so I hope in our research we’ve avoided that, but also while accepting that there are gross simplifications to make something fit into the structure of a song. 

Nick Holmes Music: The most recent album, The Light of Ancient Mistakes (2023) felt like a series of themes rather than an overarching concept? 

That’s one that doesn’t have a story, but it has got several interlocking themes. One is the idea of tragedies that then have repercussions through history. We might use science fiction stories as a way into those themes, although they are themes that are very relevant in real life. It gives you a little bit of a sense of distance to explore them thousands of years in the future rather than now – so that that theme of the ongoing harm from past atrocities.

We’ve also got a similar thing in terms of the childhood of the writer [David John Moore Cornwell] who became John le Carré and had a traumatic childhood, and he felt that very much influenced his ongoing relations with people around him throughout his life.  

Then also, at the end of the album, exploring environmental damage and the ongoing harms from the carbonification of our economy.  

Nick Holmes Music: Are you ever worried that the songs or the albums might just fall over under the weight of the concept? And I’m not saying that they do, but do you see it as a risk? 

[Pauses to think] I haven’t really thought about that in terms of our stuff previously, but I have had previously ideas that could have formed albums or songs where I said, ‘Well. I can see that giving an arc of say two or three songs, but if we try to make that into an album, I feel I’d then be padding it out and I wouldn’t want to feel I was doing that’, and so there are plenty of concepts that don’t become albums.  

For example, for quite a lot of our albums, there’s a theme rather just an individual story. I wouldn’t necessarily want it to be just a hackneyed sequence of, you know, inciting incident and then the hero is knocked back, and then the standard story flow for everything. But for us it very much depends on what the inspiring concept is, so if it’s a general thematic concept then I think we can bring in a wide range of different styles and ideas. If it’s a particular story, then there’s maybe a clearer thematic path, but you’re also a bit restricted from veering off [down] side alleyways on the way there.  

It perhaps would be harder if we were doing it like a musical, where it’s literally telling a story, but I think our albums are more, when there’s a story, it’s more they’re following a story rather than telling a story. So sometimes people have said it’s like watching a film, if they’re listening to an album from start to finish and it’s got a shape and a flow. You wouldn’t necessarily know what the story was without reading the notes because we’re not necessarily making it very explicit. 

I’d quite like the idea of doing a musical as a separate kind of thing. I do like musicals, but there the storytelling is more overt, whereas [on our albums] maybe the story is sometimes more like a landscape that you’re following, and then that helps guide the writing rather than necessarily having to say, ‘look, that’s a tree, that’s a mountain.’ 

Pain 

Nick Holmes Music: If it’s ok with you, I’d like to talk to you about Ehlers-Danlos syndrome? 

That’s fine. I try to raise awareness of invisible disability issues. 

Nick Holmes Music: What effect does it have on you?  

It’s a genetic disease that causes problems with collagen. Collagen is the most extensive protein in your body and it basically holds everything together. For me personally, chronic pain, fatigue, vomiting, problems with blood pressure regulation, autonomic dysfunction… 

Nick Holmes Music: Which means that the basic nervous system isn’t working? 

Well, yes, you sometimes get not enough blood going to your brain. 

Nick Holmes: And brain fog? 

Brain fog is a really important one which I was forgetting then, which is a nice example of it!

And then it gives peripheral neuropathy. So you know, I don’t feel my where bits of my body are so accurately as might be nice. The tendency to trip up like does make doing things like looping on your pedalboard difficult – my feet really aren’t very reliably agile! 

Nick Holmes Music: The classic Pain Scale [in America] is one to 10. Do you see your pain in a visual way, rather than just being on the medical pain scale? 

I don’t normally think of it in terms of scale. And it does vary from day-to-day which bits are working better or not. And so there’s a huge difference between when I was still doing the medical work that involved sitting at a microscope, which is probably one of the worst positions for people with spinal problems. And then I was getting recurrent slipped discs, and acute slip disc is a very different pain to the kind of more general chronic muscle pain I might get, or where the muscles insert into the tendons and the bones.  

Sometimes it’s more of an acute pain. Like when you’ve got an acutely slipped disc that’s just agonisingly awful or then there’s the more chronic pain, which just grinds you down. It’s a very different kind of experience. 

Nick Holmes Music: What’s the relationship between creativity and your pain. Is music an escape from pain?  

Being able to express some of the less positive feelings in life through something constructive I find really helpful. In off stage life, I’m not necessarily very expressive of these things. I might explain in rational terms what I experience, but I don’t think I express it much in a very emotional way. Whereas when I am singing, I get to express those things in a what for me is a safe environment. Even the songs that aren’t about my bad back – I might be singing a song about being an angsty robot or something – even though the causes might be different, the sense of distress of the character might be similar, and for me being able to express those kind of feelings in a song makes me not have to deal with them so much in the off stage bits of life. 

Nick Holmes Music: Do you find when you’re songwriting and producing songs, can you, to an extent, forget the pain? 

It certainly is very helpfully distracting. I think the music is really important for me in terms of how I manage my pain. I would be in a much worse state, particularly mentally, I think, if I didn’t have a creative outlet. 

Nick Holmes Music: Do you feel there’s a medical reason for the enjoyment you get out of music. Does it produce chemicals such as dopamine in your brain? 

For me with the kind of scientific background ultimately, I would think there’s neurochemical and biological underpinnings for this. But I do think there are a lot of people who find music hugely helpful with dealing with difficult situations, whether that’s as performers or through listening. Often at concerts we get people coming up afterwards and saying that they really appreciated such and such song, it made them feel understood. That sense of being able to actually communicate with somebody who might have difficulty explaining how they feel, that feels significant to me. 

Artificial Intelligence and Creativity 

Nick Holmes Music: On the recent single, One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov) you used AI to create the cover, is that right? 

I’ve had a long-standing interest in AI, going back to our second album, some of which is sung from the perspective of an AI that thinks it is conscious, or at least acts as if it thinks it is conscious. 

For a while, artificial intelligence in the arts became fashionable, and now there is a reaction against it. On the creative side, I do understand the arguments of people who are against AI being used in art. There are certainly issues about recompense for people whose art has been used in training models. I’m not disputing that, but from our perspective, as people who see the album artwork as an integral part of the album, we find it a useful tool. Like any tool, it can be used well or badly. We use AI assisted imagery as part of a process that generally involves combining elements from multiple images, sometimes combined with photography, and manipulation in Photoshop.

It’s not just that we put a prompt of say ‘Prog Rock album cover’ and then just take the first one that comes up, but I don’t want to give a misleading impression that I can draw or paint, and I greatly admire those who can. I think some of the problem relates to terminology. Generating, selecting, editing, and manipulating AI generated imagery to produce something that resonates with you is perhaps more like being a curator, director, photographer, or collage artist, rather than being a painter.  

I’ve never hidden the fact that some of our album covers do have AI elements, but then again, as somebody who’s been interested in AI, I’m interested in the weaknesses of some of these models, as well as their strengths. I think sometimes you can learn something interesting when an experiment fails. 

Many years ago, I was involved in a project trying to train AI to diagnose brain tumours and it was better than chance at it, but nowhere near good enough at that stage to replace a pathologist. But by going through the process of trying to teach something artificial how to do a task, it made me realise that how I thought I was doing that process wasn’t how I was actually doing it.

Often when you have a certain expertise in something, what you think are the processes you go through to make a decision may not actually reflect what you’re really doing. By trying to teach a machine by giving it certain rules and then seeing where it’s going wrong, you can learn about how you really do something. Similarly, I think sometimes it’s interesting when you give a prompt to an AI and it comes up with something that’s not quite right in that kind of uncanny valley way. I’m interested in those aspects of the failures of the system as well. 

I am concerned about the material that is used to train AI models – both language and images. In addition to the problem of fair payment for use of copyright material, I think anybody who has spent more than a few minutes on the Internet will be aware that not all attitudes expressed therein are great exemplars for how you might want to train a future intelligence!

Nick Holmes Music: Steven Wilson surprised everyone – including himself! – last year by writing a Christmas song, using lyrics that had been generated by AI. How do you feel as a musician about collaborating with artificial intelligence, either lyrically or musically? 

I’m not against it principle, but I think if I did, my interest would be in that aspect where what is generated is somewhat flawed. So if it was openly that this is in collaboration with an AI that doesn’t actually understand what the words mean, but they’ve put together, probabilistically, in terms of predicting what words likely to come next, that also may be telling you something which may or may not be interesting about that huge swathe of data on which it’s trained. 

So far it hasn’t hugely appealed to me for our actual songwriting. For me, the lyrics are really important, 50% roughly of the creativity, and often explore scientific and historical themes. The stuff we’re writing is not the kind of thing on which AI models will currently have been trained. But then again, a lot of lyrics throughout history have not been particularly original. How many variations of love songs are there without repeating a concept?  

I can imagine AI being good at making variants within the constraints of standardised, formulaic forms. For example, if you wanted to have a Concerto Grosso in the style of a prolific composer, you could probably get an AI to produce something that would sound like a decent mid-ranking composer of such things.  I’m not saying I’d necessarily want to listen to it though!

Similarly with visual art, you might be able to generate an image similar to some that already exist, but it would currently struggle to produce something original. Although you could argue that when we think we’re producing something new, it’s largely about juxtaposing existing contrasting elements. I think humans are currently better than AI at producing artistically interesting new combinations of ideas, but I don’t know if in principle that will always be the case.

Perhaps it depends on whether we think intentionality is essential for something to have artistic meaning. At the moment, there is no suggestion that AI have a sense of self with which to care about anything they produce. There is a philosophical debate to be had as to whether that matters. A landscape can be moving without having been generated with an artistic intention.

Nick Holmes Music: Do you ever see yourself using artificial intelligence in the production process? 

I have no problem with that in principle. For example, when we record the vocals I spend quite a lot of time cutting out mouth noises and plosives. If there was software that did that reliably for me without messing up the character of the rest of the sound, that would be fine by me. I wouldn’t miss that aspect of it. There are certain tools that I do use as part of that process, but I tend to have them on quite subtle settings and then work on the worst bits by hand. I’d have no problem delegating that to a reliable AI.  

Some people use AI based mastering. So far when I’ve tried it, I haven’t liked it as much as what we do by ear but then again, I might be quite biased because I’m choosing what I do when I’m doing it by ear, and maybe somebody else would prefer what the AI is doing. I don’t know. I could imagine in the future, though, it could well be better than I would do. I mean, mastering was something that I learned to do in order to release my stuff rather than because it was something that I had a natural affinity for. 

Nick Holmes Music: What have you learned about producing? Do you feel you’ve improved over the years? 

I do. So the first album we did, Invisible, I didn’t really imagine it would be listened to by anybody other than me. It was just like a ticking off a thing for myself, ‘I’ve made an album. Good. That’s an achievement. I’ll do something else next’, but without really thinking that it was likely to be heard by anyone. And I was just mixing that and mastering it on the laptop with £30 little Sony earbuds, which apparently is not the done thing in a pro level studio! 

I think fortunately when I listen to it on things that aren’t £30 earbuds it sounds right. I haven’t had any kind of particularly negative feedback about it, but I think that’s more by luck than because of my skill there, I think that that was a fortunate accident that worked out OK. It could have been that I put it on proper speakers and it was just this massive low end [makes low bass noise] which I would never have heard on these earbuds, because the frequency just doesn’t go low enough. And I think as our albums have gone on, technically the producing I think has got better as I’ve learned more about what I’m doing hopefully. 

Nick Holmes Music: In what sense? Is it about the equipment that you put in your home studio? 

No, not really. My home studio is me and the laptop. I’m lying down in bed because I have to spend most of my time lying down. And so I do most of my music work just with the laptop on my chest and lie down. 

Nick Holmes Music: But with a decent pair of headphones? 

I now have a decent pair of headphones. But actually the equipment is not particularly different to what I was using, but the way I listen hopefully has evolved and you know I’m more aware I think of carving out space for particular instruments and think about the EQ and certain technical things with the reverbs. But the actual facilities aren’t that different, it’s just hopefully how you use them!

Part II of the interview will be posted shortly.