Tag: Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate

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Interview – Malcolm Galloway from Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate on the new album The Uncertainty Principle and the Prog the Forest Festival

The Cover of the Uncertainty Principle by Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate

Malcolm Galloway is the lead singer, songwriter, guitarist and keyboard-player of London-based prog rock band Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, with bass player Mark Gatland.

Nick Holmes Music met with Galloway in London to discuss the band’s latest album The Uncertainty Principle and the band’s annual Prog the Forest festival, which takes place at the Fiddler’s Elbow in London. (For a review of last year’s festival, see here.)

Malcolm Galloway

Nick Holmes Music: You have just announced another Prog the Forest festival for December 2025. Tell me about last year’s event.

MG: It’s our annual environmental charity fundraiser. We raise funds for the World Land Trust. This charity works in collaboration with local partners and local communities to buy threatened land that’s environmentally significant. It puts it into a legally protected permanent trust so that it can be used for the benefit of local communities and the environment. This has an impact on the climate. They focus on strategically important areas, for example, providing bridges between two isolated bits of ecosystem that may not, in isolation, be sustainable. But if there’s a small but significant bridge between them, it can then become a much more thriving ecosystem.

The organisers of this event are Mark Gatland and me from Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate and Chris Parkins, the London Prog Gigs promoter. He’s a wonderful promoter of independent progressive music in London. I think he’s one of the main driving forces behind the resurgence of independent new progressive music in London. Last year was our sixth year and the most financially successful to date. We raised enough to protect 26.25 acres of threatened habitat.

So, we’re really pleased, and we’re delighted with all the performers who so kindly gave their time and talents to the event. We’re very fortunate to get such extraordinary musicians agreeing to come and play our little festival. We’ve developed so we’ve got an audience that is aware of the event and regularly comes and seems to be very, very supportive of the musicians. I really enjoy the atmosphere there.

Nick Holmes Music: It felt very supportive. Several of the musicians, after playing their set, hung around to listen to the other sets.

MG: Yes. There are quite a few musicians who come along even in years when they’re not performing.

Nick Holmes Music: It felt to me also like an artistic success – you had everything from solo jazz flute to something bordering on heavy metal, to acoustic covers of Rush songs.

MG: One of the lovely things about being involved in this kind of event is that we can put on things that we want to listen to. Also, the prog audience, from our experience, is open-minded and I really like that.

We know that if we put on a band that’s let’s say, veering into the more metal area or one that’s more folky or acoustic, or that uses skulls as percussion instruments – the wonderfully theatrical Spriggan Mist – the audience will appreciate them.

One year, we had John Etheridge, who is obviously very familiar to prog audiences from his prog work, but he was doing a set with Vimala Rowe, a wonderful jazz singer. And so, we feel that although there’s a centre of gravity in prog rock for the event, the idea is for it to be progressive in a wide sense, and it really aims to be quite diverse.

I was certainly pleased with the range and the diversity we had last year, and I like the idea that people might hear a genre they’ve never heard before and come away thinking, ‘I didn’t expect to like that. I now really want to go and check that out.’

Nick Holmes Music: I spoke to a couple of members of the band Mountainscape. They told me their set was mild by their standards, and that they can play much, much heavier than that. Did you ask them to do that?

MG: We didn’t ask them to, but it’s an interesting question. To what extent do you tailor your set according to the event? When we’re thinking about our sets at other events, we’re certainly aware of what kind of event it is. We’ve done things like art galleries, where we play a different kind of set compared to playing at something like a metal festival. But when we’re doing prog festivals, we feel able to have quite a broad palette that we can include in the event.

I don’t think we’ve ever tried to suggest to any of the performers what they do or don’t do. But I could also understand if they know the kind of event it is, they might have prog and more metal elements, and they might then focus more on the prog elements.

Nick Holmes Music: Thinking of the Hats Off Set at Prog the Forest, you’ve adapted some of your sets to the fact that you didn’t have a keyboard?

MG: It’s just a practical consideration. I’m probably better at the keyboard than the guitar, realistically, but the guitar is much easier to carry because it tends to be a bit lighter. I don’t particularly like playing a non-weighted keyboard, it’s not what I’m used to under the fingers. On the other hand, weighted keyboards are beyond my lifting capacity. And because I can’t drive, if we’re playing in a venue that has a keyboard, I’ll probably include some keyboard parts, not necessarily songs where the keyboard is a focus on the album, but I’ll do some more solos on keyboard rather than guitar.

Sometimes we do sets where we perform a first half keyboard-oriented and a second half guitar-oriented, such as at the Camden Club. They’ve got a nice keyboard there.

Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate at The Camden Club
Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate at the Camden Club, London

Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about recording the new album, The Uncertainty Principle.

MG: The way that Mark and I work, it’s an iterative process, so I will send him a version of a mix, and he will come back with suggestions, and point out for instance where I’ve accidentally turned off a track. So, for example, we had a track which was going quite well, and I spent lot of time spent trying to get rid of digital clicks that seem to arise, horrible mouth noises that I don’t like. I managed to get rid of them, but in doing so I’d accidentally deleted half the guitar solo. So then I had to go back to try to find out where it went. That’s the process until we gradually get to a point where we’re both happy.

Nick Holmes Music: Who has the final say?

MG: We’ve not had anything where we have particularly disagreed so far. That hasn’t been an issue, it tends to be consensual. I think, though, that Mark will often be the one saying, ‘That’s fine, you don’t need to keep tinkering.’ There’s a temptation to keep making tiny changes, but that comes with the risk of accidentally creating bigger mistakes than the problem I’m trying to fix.

Once we think all the tracks are finished, then we’re checking that the levels on each track sound right compared to each other, or if anything stands out as being a different kind of sonic world, where we might need to go back and change that in the mix, even if it worked for that song in isolation. We want things to work for the album as whole as well, so a little bit of compromise and balancing at that point.

Nick Holmes Music: When you reach that stage where it’s almost done, do you ever either radically change the running order, or even drop a track? Steven Wilson on The Future Bites  dropped a track at very short notice. And for the new Cure album, Songs of a Lost World, Robert Smith got as far as printing the lyrics and then dropped the track Bodiam Sky so if you buy the physical album, the lyrics for that missing track are still there.

MG: That’s interesting. We’ve never done anything that late. Normally we have to cut down the amount of material that we want to include to what fits on a CD.

This also feeds into why we haven’t got any releases on vinyl. There are two main reasons. One is that for obscure bands with limited potential sales, the unit cost becomes probably more than 10 times the price of a CD.

The other reason is that because of the length of our albums, each one would have to be a double album. It would be a lovely thing to have and stick up on the wall, but it would be quite expensive for anybody to buy.

We normally have more material than we can fit, so we’re having to trim things and drop things, but we also work hard to make sure that there’s a flow and shape to the albums. So, we had a track, Helgoland [that later became the B-side of the single Between Two Worlds] that we both like, but just in terms of the shape of the album, it made more sense not to include it. It was an instrumental and in terms of the narrative of the album, it would have meant overbalancing one part of the album in terms of instrumentals versus vocal tracks. Although you have an affection for the things you’ve created, you also don’t want to make the album less strong by forcing in things that don’t fit.

The other aspect is the packaging because we’re an independent nano label. When I say a record label, I don’t mean anything very commercial. It means my laptop, my very creaking 10-year-old laptop, and stuffing envelopes. It’s not particularly glamorous.

We design all the artwork and the packaging, and it always comes as a pleasant surprise to me with these very complicated-looking Photoshop templates, trying to make sure that the right bit of the booklets, where it all gets glued, overlap so that actually everything lines up. I don’t find that at all intuitive. Mark and I design these together, and then he does a little mock-up with glue and scissors to check that what we’re sending off to the printers isn’t going to come back looking like complete rubbish, hopefully.

That’s also an iterative process. I’ll write something and send a draft to Mark, ‘OK, well, there’s a spelling mistake here, and oh, there’s a space before a comma here. You need to get rid of that’, magnifying these things on the screen and trying to find these tiny little things without accidentally making it worse.

The cover of Between Two Worlds, released as a single on 29 January 2025

Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about a track that you have played live a few times, Between Two Worlds.

MG: It’s by far the least twiddly and complicated and technical song on the album. It’s just me with a piano, plus some strings and a very subtle synth pad. We found it the most difficult one to record. I think people might assume that the more complicated stuff is the hardest, but that isn’t necessarily the case, when something is very exposed, like in that song where it’s quite quiet and the voice doesn’t have anything to hide behind.

To me, it’s quite an emotional song. It’s about somebody being in an MRI scanner. I don’t know if you’re familiar with how MRIs work, but it’s all based on quantum physics. The whole theme of the album relates to quantum physics, the uncertainty principle. It sounds very abstract and unreal, but every day thousands of people are having scans that are affecting their lives with this technology that builds a picture of what’s going on inside your body based on flipping the spin of your hydrogen nuclei. And it just sounds so science fiction. It doesn’t sound like a real thing, but it’s just so routine and we don’t often think about it.

The back story that I had for the song was a person who has had cancer, has had treatment, has had a rough time and is having a scan to find out whether it’s spread or whether the treatment’s been successful. It’s the Schrödinger’s Cat idea. If you’re in a closed system, and something happens at a random quantum level, can it be said from the outside to have happened, not happened, or both at the same time?

The nature of certain things at the quantum level is extremely counterintuitive. It sounds a bit ridiculous but there does seem to be good evidence for it, although not necessarily on a macroscopic level.

In the context of the song, the whole Cat thing is meant to be metaphorical. I think it was originally used as a criticism of the theory rather than a way of advocating for it. Just because something can happen at the level of a tiny particle doesn’t mean it happens for a person or a cat.

But as an analogy, we’ve got somebody inside a scanner, and these results are being generated on a computer somewhere. Until somebody looks at them, they exist between these two future selves.

I’ve had some experiences, but not quite as terrible as that on a personal level, situations where, depending on how a binary choice goes, that’s outside of your control, your life takes one path or another. So that song was inspired by the awful uncertainty of people in that kind of situation, including far too many family and friends.

We did a version that we really liked, except it was done on a real acoustic piano and it had a very squeaky sustain pedal, so it’s got this really emotional stuff going on and all this ‘squeak, squeak.’ I spent ages trying to edit it out the squeak, which was probably a waste of time because it just made it sound artificial. If you had lots of drums and synthesisers and twiddly guitar solos, you probably could have hidden that I’d removed the squeak.

So I then tried with a home electric piano, which was better, but I probably sing better standing up, and I can’t do that while I’m playing the piano. So I was trying to do the piano part first, then do the vocal on top of it. But then it’s a song that’s meant to be quite fluid rather than just sticking to a metronome. So then I tried to record it, piano first without a metronome, then sitting the vocals on top, but trying to concentrate on remembering what the piano was about to do while singing distracted me from the meaning of the words.

And then we tried it on guitar, and that came close to being used as a guitar and voice version. However, it still didn’t quite feel like what we wanted. Then we tried bigger arrangements, and then it felt like it was overblown.  In the final version, some subtle strings are blended in, but it is largely voice and piano.

We went through quite a few different key change options because the lowest parts of the song fit my voice in the morning, and the later parts of the song I can only really do in the evening, but ideally you want it to be more of a one take feel, so we had to find a compromise that was near enough for both bits.

Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about the title track, The Uncertainty Principle.

MG: It starts ominously, and when we play it live, we don’t do much other than the harmonised vocal in that initial section. Then the guitars and bass come in, and it gets a bit more hectic. It ends with a solo that isn’t the usual kind of solo I would do. There are certain things that your fingers are comfortable with, and you can do that kind of thing without really thinking about it. And then there are other things where you write it.

Most of my solos take a more intuitive approach, but this one was more written, choosing specific notes. So that was a bit of a challenge to remember to play the right notes rather than just the usual blues scales.

Nick Holmes Music: Did you create that solo by comping it together from lots of different versions, or did it just flow as you wrote it?

MG: I built up the idea of it, and then it was done in one take. I think the whole melody was in one take.

Nick Holmes Music: Does the new album have a concept or a narrative structure?

MG: It starts with Certainty, which is kind of a scene-setting song about the change in the philosophy of science, when the idea of uncertainty, being an inherent property of reality, became mainstream science. We extrapolate from that into uncertainty in more interpersonal and psychological aspects, which I acknowledge is a scientific liberty, but it’s still the idea that certainty in various fields has been shown to be a less reliable interpretation of reality than is typically assumed.

I think you could argue that there is an increasing understanding of the unreliability of our own introspection in psychology, our certainty about ourselves. Freud gets credited with pioneering an emphasis on our unconscious drives, although he wasn’t the first person to address unconscious influences in human behaviour.

If you look at false memories, it shows how we can be fairly easily manipulated into being pretty certain of things that are demonstrably not true. So uncertainty in its various manifestations is the overriding theme, and the first song introduces that theme.

Everything Changed develops the uncertainty principle theme. Then we have an instrumental, The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, a very dramatic name. It describes emission spectra not fitting the theoretical model of classical Physics. It doesn’t sound very catastrophic. In Physics, I’m a layperson. I have an interest in the history of science, and the philosophy of science but I’m not a Physics expert, but basically at the beginning of the 20th century, you had predictions that were made based on the understanding of Physics at the time, which were completely incompatible with what was being found by experiments, and this was seen to be a catastrophe.

The Cover of Copenhagen by Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate
The Cover of Copenhagen, released as a single on 11 June 2024

Then it moves to Copenhagen and we’re moving chronologically as the album goes on. The song is about the disputed conversation during WW2 between Werner Heisenberg, head of the German nuclear programme and his former mentor Niels Bohr.

The next song is the title track The Uncertainty Principle. So we’ve taken the character of Heisenberg from Copenhagen. A few years later, he’s being hunted by Moe Berg, the American spy and former professional baseball player, who was sent to attend a public lecture Heisenberg gave in Zurich at which he was supposed to decide whether to assassinate him, based on how close he was to developing a nuclear bomb.

Quite why a former professional baseball player who then become a spy is in a position to judge from a public lecture whether or not somebody is on the verge of building nuclear bomb, seems to be quite a bizarre thing. But Berg turns up in Zurich with his pistol in his jacket and with his mission, and he decides not to assassinate Heisenberg. We now know in retrospect that they weren’t particularly close to developing the bomb.

Throughout the album we have that recurrent theme of decision making under conditions of uncertainty. All that was influenced by my work in medicine in the past, where I was involved in teaching about misdiagnosis, where these issues of certainty and confidence were a major issue in misdiagnosis. And there are references in the lyrics throughout the album to lyrics of earlier songs on the album for the same characters.

Then we have another instrumental, Cause And Effect (But Not Necessarily In That Order).

Then we move forward a few years to The Think Tank. The song was very loosely inspired by the experiences of Daniel Ellsberg, who worked for a think tank called the RAND Corporation set up in the 1950s. It was a company set up by the American Air Force originally. It was one of the first think tanks where the government employs them to do research on strategic things. And one of their jobs was designing nuclear war planning.

Ellsberg wrote about his experiences of working in that industry, and he described the feeling that it seemed like an ordinary, nice office job in an academic environment. Everyone’s very polite and friendly, very sympathetic and full of empathy. But then, a few minutes later, their job is working out where to target the missiles at particular towns on the other side to maximise casualties.

He described an experience where he suddenly had that sense of being outside of yourself, looking and thinking, what am I doing? What are we doing here? All these very normal, nice people using their very powerful minds to try and plan how to wipe out hundreds of millions of people. And so later on, he became a whistleblower.

The song was very loosely based on his description of his experience of that jarring disconnect of doing something he thought was monstrous in a very normal office environment. This was planning for an atrocity that, fortunately, so far hasn’t happened, but perhaps you can imagine people involved in other atrocities, where within that group they’re empathic to each other, and in other ways act in a way we would consider very normal. It is easy for us to divide the world into us and them, and to accept or even contribute to appalling actions against the people we don’t see as ‘us’. The danger of dehumanising others is a recurrent theme in our songwriting.

But that individual song is quite playful sounding, even though the thematic material obviously isn’t very playful; it’s got a kind of retro, rocky type of feel, but not going back all the way to the 50s, which is when the actual song idea is set.

The Cover of One Word That Means the World (Arkhipov)
The Cover of One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov) released as a single on 5 April 2025

One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov) is definitely not playful sounding, but it’s maybe got a bit more of an 80’s rock type feel with the twiddly guitars and that kind of production. I know that the story isn’t set in the 80s, but on the other hand the difference in time between now and then is similar to the difference in time when I was growing up versus the events in the stories that we’re talking about. So that sense of sounding like it was made a few decades previously was an aesthetic choice aiming to reflect the setting of the story.

One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov) is about the Soviet submariner who refused to fire a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That takes us to the end of the historical narrative, and we have a bit of a pause with an instrumental. And then we come to a sort of fictional now with the ‘between two worlds’ of the person in an MRI machine, bringing together an element of the quantum story, plus something much more personal than what’s been in the rest of the album.

Nick Holmes Music: So, you’re going into fiction, but in Between Two Worlds are you also drawing on your past experience and your teaching? 

MG: I’ve had a lot of experience unfortunately of cancer-related things in terms of family bereavement and friends, and also having been a cancer doctor, and I have had lots of scans for various things myself, though I’m not claiming I’ve had anything as awful as a lot of people in that kind of situation. But those were the influences that went into that song.

And then the last song is Living with Uncertainty. I know a lot of our thematic content is on the darker side, but we try to end the albums, I’m not saying with a happy ending, but at least with a glimmer of hope, we don’t just make it completely depressing.

Living with Uncertainty is meant to round it off and it does have some lyrical quotes from earlier in the album. It’s about acknowledging that living with uncertainty is an inherent part of life. It’s difficult – it’s very comforting to grab onto something and say, ‘well, I’m certain of this, regardless of any evidence’, but the song aims to argue that we don’t have to think we’ve always got all the answers.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be intellectually curious and trying to find things out. I’m very pro science, but it would be a fundamentally unscientific approach to think that you can always be certain. In most things in life, I suspect if we questioned, why might we be wrong rather than always looking for ways to justify that we are right, we might get along with each other better as a species.

Nick Holmes Music: Does that bring a kind of peace then, if you can reconcile yourself to that?

MG:  I would say it’s something I aspire to rather than necessarily achieve. I’m not some kind of entirely calm guru; I’m a very anxious person. If I lived in the way that the song would suggest, I’d probably be happier than if I lived in the way that I usually manage. So, I’m certainly not preaching, saying you should be like me, but I do consciously try to challenge my own assumptions.

It’s very easy to think people are excessively certain of things. But it’s very rare that people apply that to people they agree with, or to themselves. It’s very easy to say – whichever political viewpoint you have, or whichever your preferred genre of music, or any kind of polarising thing – ‘that person is wrong to be really sure of themselves’, but not to apply the same principle to the people you agree with.

The Uncertainty Principle is out now. Prog the Forest takes place at the Fiddler’s Elbow, Camden, London at 13.30 on Saturday 6 December 2025.

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Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate and Ghost of the Machine Album Launch – Live Review

Sunday 6 April 2025

Camden Club, London

*****

A double-header of new prog rock albums in a Sunday afternoon launch

Despite the London sunshine, rather than lazing on a Sunday afternoon, progressive rock fans packed themselves into the small but perfectly formed venue that is the Camden club. Long songs and high concepts were promised, and this gig didn’t disappoint. The event, organised by the tireless Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs, saw the launch of two new albums. Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate were here to showcase their eighth studio album, The Uncertainty Principle. But before that, a relatively new band – albeit made up of veterans – Ghost of the Machine had travelled from Yorkshire to launch their second studio album, Empires Must Fall.

Charlie Bramald and Malcolm Galloway in the Q&A Session. Photo courtesy of Béla Alabástrom 

The afternoon began with a short Q&A session hosted by Charlie Bramald of Ghost of the Machine and Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off. An audience member asked if there would be any dancing. Galloway said that, as a former doctor, he would recommend physical exercise and invited the audience to ‘express themselves physically,’ before admitting that sounded wrong. He asked Bramald which came first in creating an album, ‘the concept, the music… or the choreography.’

As Genesis themselves admitted, prog rockers generally ‘can’t dance’ – presumably because of the complex time signatures (one of the most amusing sights I have seen at a prog rock gig was several seated gentlemen on the front row of a Steven Wilson concert, desperately trying to head bang in time to one of Wilson’s more esoteric rhythms). Bramald, whose band have been compared to Genesis, admitted that the genesis (see what he did there?) of the songs was usually a keyboard part from Mark [Hagan]. Galloway said that he usually wrote in speech rhythms, and did an uncannily inaccurate [sic] demonstration of Beyoncé singing a melismatic melody.

Bramald asked Galloway how the eighth Hats Off album differed from the previous seven. Galloway quipped that the main difference between the albums was the colour scheme of the booklet. But there was a serious point – the album traces the development of quantum physics up to the 1950s, so a Cold War colour scheme was felt appropriate. Some of the highly imaginative images from the album were projected on a screen behind the band. However, before we became too impressed by the technology, the band’s bass player, Mark Gatland admitted he couldn’t hear his bass amp as it was hidden behind the screen.

Ghost of the Machine have only one fewer word in their name than Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, although it could be argued they are syllabically challenged in comparison. They made up for their lack of syllables by having six band members on stage – Bramald (vocals), Graham Garbett and Scott Owens (guitars), Mark Hagan (keyboards), Stuart McAuley (bass) and Andy Milner (drums). They decided to treat us to the entire album, Empires Must Fall, in the order it appears. This was their first London gig, and early on Bramald said it had been worth coming all the way from Yorkshire; the sold-out audience was very enthusiastic.

The new album is, naturally, a concept album. It continues the narrative from the first album, Scissorgames (2022). At the end of that album, the main character, Hope, who appears on the cover of both albums, freed herself from a tyrant but ended up in prison as a result. She becomes a superior being and creates an empire of light into which she draws those who are due to commit crimes in the future. As Bramald told Stephen Lambe of Prog magazine, the moral ambiguity of this is similar to that of the 2002 film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise. She starts a revolution which leads to war, but the album ends on a more hopeful note of forgiveness.

Vocalist Charlie Bramald flanked by Scott Owens and Andy Milner on guitar, with Andy Milner on drums. Photo courtesy of Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs

It’s tempting to play a game of spot the influence with a relatively new band. As mentioned earlier, Genesis is a possibility, as is Marillion. There were touches of Asia, and Yes, and Bramald’s voice was sometimes reminiscent of Geddy Lee of Rush or Roger Hodgson of Supertramp. However, while acknowledging that these luminaries make excellent musical company, the band itself prefers not to be categorised. The only overt influence was when keyboard player Hagan gave a brief rendition of Tubeway Army’s 1979 smash hit Are ‘Friends’ Electric, written by Gary Numan, his musical hero. However, there was a definite influence from Rick Wakeman’s 1974 classic, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, particularly in the opening song, Keepers of the Light. The instrumental section was lacking a glittering cape but was suitably proggy, before the band returned to one of its great strengths, strong melodies. Bramald, as in all the songs, was a compelling stage presence, acting out the lyrics while his voice soared above the band.

Days That Never Were began with gentle piano and synth, and a lovely bass riff that introduced a rocky number with a beautiful harmonic change. The song ended with a mighty drum flourish. Bramald explained that the next song, Panopticon, is the centre piece of the album. For those who don’t know (I admit that I didn’t), a panopticon is a circular prison designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century, to allow all the prisoners to be seen at the same time. It’s a perfect metaphor for isolation, as in the wall that surrounds the protagonist in Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall. As the lyrics of Panopticon state, we are ‘prisoners of our own design’, who eventually break out from prison, just as Pink Floyd’s character tears down the wall. The panopticon is also a metaphor for surveillance culture, a malevolent form of the benign accumulation of data that Peter Gabriel describes in his song Panopticom (note the change in the final letter) from his 2023 album i/o. But, as Days That Never Were states, ‘Empires must fall’… and, according to Bramald, we can help bring them down. Interestingly, Hats Off expressed a similar opinion in the song All Empires Fall from 2022’s The Confidence Trick. As Galloway writes,

Even the most evil dictator will, like everyone else, die. Every empire eventually crumbles. At the most basic level, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that any conquest is ultimately temporary. All empires fall.

The highlight of Ghost of the Machine’s set was the final song from their new album, the 14-minute epic After the War. The first section, ‘Runs Away’, began as a piano ballad, featuring gentle guitar and backing vocals from Graham Garbett. The song built up pleasingly to a metal guitar section, with a sense of inevitability and majesty. The next section, ‘Bells’, featured a suitably bell-like piano part by Mark Hagan, frenetic percussion, and swirling guitars. Section three, ‘Sunrise and Sirens’ began with a flowing piano part and an almost funky guitar riff, expressing optimism around the lyric ‘the war is over’. In the next section, the instrumental ‘Sorrow in the Silence’, Scott Owens played a spiky guitar solo, and Garbett joined him in a lovely duet. The final sections, ‘The Sound of Home’ and ‘With Me’ were uplifting, including another fine solo from Garbett, whose playing had been superb throughout the set.

Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off self-deprecatingly offered to ‘kill the mood’ with ‘an hour of very educational stuff about quantum physics.’ As a former neuropathologist, the concepts behind the Hats Off albums often have a strong scientific basis. But as Galloway said in the Q&A session, the songs aren’t ‘just dry physics.’ For each track, he adopts the perspective of a different character. A good example is the One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov), the first single from the new album, in which Galloway describes an agonising dilemma in an eloquent and moving vignette about ‘not starting a nuclear war.’ Galloway and Gatland performed a blistering version; Galloway’s agonised vocals bring out the song’s anguish and essential humanity in a stunning performance. The opening song, Certainty, the first track on the new album, began with a vocal duet, Galloway and Gatland singing in gentle unison. But as the song reached its climax, Galloway’s voice exploded with emotion. The deep bond between these two gentlemen (they have known each other since school) was evident when they faced each other, and a warm smile passed between them.

Galloway reassured the audience that there would be ‘no shouting’ on the third song in the set, the instrumental The Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This is difficult to play, but as Gatland quipped at the end, ‘someone’s been putting the hours in.’ There was a spacey, psychedelic intro with sequenced keyboards, and virtuosic guitar-playing from Galloway – those hours of practice paid off. Gatland’s bass-playing was delightfully chunky, and at one point he played his bass around his knees like a prog rock Peter Hook. A genuinely inspiring performance. Galloway’s voice was lower, richly warm in Copenhagen, another single from The Uncertainty Principle, bringing out the humanity and ambiguity of the much-disputed meeting between quantum physicist Niels Bohr and his former student Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941.

The deep humanity of Galloway’s performance was evident in another new song, Between Two Worlds, which one suspects is more personal, given that he has suffered from complex medical conditions. To use an analogy from quantum mechanics, the song explores the dilemma in Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, the uncertainty in waiting for test results which could be either positive or negative. Galloway performed a moving version on solo piano, with half-spoken contemplative vocals, drawing us into a strange world between two worlds.

From the personal, Galloway brought us back to the political in another new song, Think Tank. In a lengthy and fascinating introduction, Galloway explained that the song is inspired by a whistleblower from a US nuclear war think tank in the 1950s, which decided it was too complicated to have two different plans… so the best thing to do was to nuke both China and Russia. As Galloway dryly pointed out, ‘the apocalypse leads to some administrative challenges’, some of which were resolved by the five-digit nuclear code being incredibly hard to guess (00000 in case you were wondering). At least, as Galloway said, we were lucky that we weren’t in some hideous post-apocalyptic wasteland. ‘How do you know?’ came the witty response from an audience member. Whatever the theoretical background of the song, Galloway and Gatland’s performance was stunning. Galloway’s guitar playing throughout the set was fluid, passionate, virtuosic and compassionate. Gatland was also playing at the top of his game. It was a privilege to witness the two of them together.

Kathryn Thomas, (Werner Heisenberg), Malcolm Galloway, and Mark Gatland. Photo courtesy of Chris Parkins

The set ended with an ‘encore’ (due to time pressure, the band didn’t leave the stage and wait for adoring applause and shouts for more), the new album’s title track, The Uncertainty Principle. Kathryn Thomas joined them on flute. With a look of fierce concentration on her face, watching Galloway like a hawk, she matched his bluesy guitar solos, bringing a lovely jazz element in contrast to the distorted guitar. At the end of the song, Galloway bade the audience ‘goodbye’.

But there was a surprise to come, an extra song, dedicated to Béla [Alabástrom], who had come all the way from Brussels, Century Rain from 2020’s Nostalgia For Infinity. The song also came as a surprise to the laptop providing the backing tracks; it gave up and left the trio to perform ‘a cappella’ as it were, with a very witty false ending in the style of King Crimson. The audience rose to its feet to give the band a well-deserved standing ovation.

Sources

Stephen Lambe Empire of Ghosts (Prog Magazine Issue 158, 07.03.25)
Malcolm Galloway The Confidence Trick – Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate (hatsoffgentlemen.com)

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Review of the Year – 2024 – Prog Rock

2024 was a stunning year for Prog Rock new and old

The Cover of Living and Alive by Beatrix Players
The Cover of  Living & Alive by Beatrix Players

The Return of Beatrix Players

Beatrix Players, led by Ms Amy Birks, made a welcome return to the progressive rock scene in late 2023 with the release of their album Living and Alive. In 2024, they brought the complete album to Manchester’s Band on the Wall and then to a triumphant home gig in the village of Barlaston, near Stoke-on-Trent. Birks was heavily pregnant and jokingly complained of ‘baby brain’; she has since given birth to a baby daughter. In the meantime, Birks and her band were superb live. Birks was a charismatic leader, her wonderfully expressive voice ranging from a warm, low mezzo to a high soprano, sometimes urgent in her delivery and at other times quietly intimate – often in the same song. She was a powerful stage presence, drawing the audience in, as their enthusiastic response showed. 

Myrkur - image by Gobinder Jhitta
Amalie Bruun (Myrkur)

Myrkur – Danish Black Metal and Scandinavian folk music

The Danish composer, vocalist, and classically trained multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun released her debut album under her own name in 2006. In 2011, she formed the indie pop duo Ex Cops with Brian Harding. The band split in 2014, and she started releasing music under the name Myrkur, Icelandic for darkness. In late 2023, she released Spine, which combines many of the styles of previous albums into a sophisticated whole, graced by her remarkably versatile voice. The album was partly based on her experience of being pregnant with her son Otto, who was born in 2019.

But the song My Blood is Gold, reviewed here in the ongoing Off the Beaten Track series, is a product of another significant life event: the death of her beloved father, Michael Bruun, in 2021. This profoundly moving track perfectly describes Bruun’s despair at her father’s death and her resolve for his memory to live on through her music.

Bruun brought her music to London in April 2024, demonstrating her versatility as a singer and songwriter in an eclectic set. Over the course of four albums and various EPs and singles, she has combined black metal with Scandinavian folk music, sometimes on the same album. Her latest album, Spine, her most eclectic yet, formed the bulk of the setlist, including a run of six songs at the start of the show. Bruun was joined on stage by Swedish folk singer Jonathan Hultén, the support act, in a gorgeous version of House Carpenter, a traditional Nordic folk song, attracting the most excited applause of the evening.

The front cover of SIRIN by Marjana Semkina
Marjana Semkina on the cover of her second solo album, SIRIN

Marjana Semkina and iamthemorning – a difficult but artistically successful year

Marjana Semkina is a member of the prog rock group iamthemorning with her Russian-born compatriot, the pianist Gleb Kolyadin, both of whom are now resident in the UK. The duo have released several records, the most recent being The Bell (2019) and the EP Counting The Ghosts (2020).

Semkina has recently pursued a parallel solo career, releasing her first solo LP, Sleepwalking, in 2020 and her EP, Disillusioned, in 2021. In 2024 she sang on the Moonflower EP with Zora Cock of Blackbriar, and released SIRIN, her second solo album. Semkina created this album without the support of a record label, raising tens of thousands of pounds for the project via crowd funding. She is an exceptional talent, as a singer and a songwriter, and a passionate promoter of her poetic and profound vision of the world through her music.

Semkina had a challenging year. Her bandmate Kolyadin was arrested and imprisoned in Thailand while on tour as a session musician with the Russian dissident rock band Bi-2. He faced deportation to Russia, where the band could have been persecuted for anti-war sentiments. Semkina highlighted the story via social media and an online petition.

Kolyadin was released after a week in prison and returned to England via Israel. A few days after his release, the duo performed an emotional comeback show at Piano Smithfield in London. Later in the year, the duo were joined by a full band to perform iamthemorning songs at St. Matthias Church in Stoke Newington, London. Semkina began with an evocative selection of her solo material, and Kolyadin demonstrated his supreme skill as an improviser in a solo piano set before the iamthemorning band played a superb band set.

The Cover of Harmonic Divergence by Steven Wilson

An Overview of Steven Wilson’s Year

While fans of Steven Wilson eagerly await his new album The Overview due in March, in 2024 he released a Record Store Day album Harmonic Divergence based on his 2023 album The Harmony Codex. Producer Ewan Pearson also remixed ‘Inclination’ from that album. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote, ‘Ewan Pearson sprinkles sunlit Balearic euphoria’, and Wilson described the remix as ‘a hypnotic cosmic disco odyssey.’

The year also saw the re-release of Storm Corrosion, the collaboration between Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt of Swedish progressive metal band Opeth, in a new Dolby Atmos remix. Wilson has been making surround mixes of his own and other bands’ albums for so long now that he has been asked to do a surround sound mix of King Crimson’s Red for the second time after he did his first surround mix of the album in 2009. He decided to teach himself the art of surround sound mixing after Elliot Scheiner created 5.1 mixes of the Porcupine Tree albums In Absentia and Deadwing.

As Mikael Åkerfeldt admitted, Storm Corrosion isn’t an easy listen. However, it is certainly not as challenging to listen to as the albums Wilson has produced for his Bass Communion project, such as Ghosts on Magnetic Tape. Both albums take a while to give up their secrets and bring joy to the listener. In the Dolby Atmos mix of Storm Corrosion, the opening track makes the most startling use of the new technology. On other tracks, the effect is more muted, but when surround sound is used, it’s more effective as it is used sparingly.

Finally, in 2024, Wilson brought festive greetings to his fans with a physical release of his 2023 Christmas song, December Skies, complete with two Wilson-themed Christmas cards. The year also marked the fifth anniversary of the release of love you to bits, Wilson’s album with his no-man bandmate Tim Bowness, a melancholy disco masterpiece.                                        

Cover of Perpetual Motions by Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard
Perpetual Motions by Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard

Perpetual Change with Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard

Gavin Harrison, the drummer in Steven Wilson’s band Porcupine Tree, released Perpetual Motions, his second album with bass player Antoine Fafard, a collection of inventive musical explorations and collaborations from the virtuosic duo and several friends. The album’s title describes the perpetual change of musical arrangement from one of Fafard’s compositions to the next, the only constant being the playing of Fafard and Harrison on every piece. Remarkably, Fafard presented Harrison with complete recordings to add drums and percussion later; Harrison’s playing perfectly matches the pieces so it’s impossible to tell that his recordings were done separately. 

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland
Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland of Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate

Malcolm Galloway had a more than Adequate Year

Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate provided deep insights into his health condition and his writing process in a fascinating two-part interview: Part One and Part Two are here. Galloway and his bandmate Mark Gatland have a new album out in March, The Uncertainty Principle. In the meantime, One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov), one of the singles from the album, was released in 2024. It’s a compelling snapshot of a moral dilemma in which one man’s brave decision probably averted World War III. Hats Off shared the bill in Camden, London with a new discovery for me, the band EBB, who have a wonderful stage presence.

Prog the Forest at the Fiddler’s Elbow

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland, with the promoter London Prog Gigs, hosted a charity prog festival, Prog the Forest, at the Fiddler’s Elbow in Camden. All performers gave their services for free to support the rainforest and wildlife conservation charity, World Land Trust, which ‘protects the world’s most biologically significant and threatened habitats.’ This was the sixth year of Prog the Forest and the most successful to date, raising £2750 to protect nearly 26 acres of rainforest and other threatened habitats.

The eclectic line-up was made up of: Spriggan Mist, a ‘pagan progressive rock band’; singer-songwriter Leoni Jane Kennedy, who was hand-picked by members of Queen for the Freddie Mercury Scholarship and plays acoustic Rush covers as well as her own songs; The Mighty Handful who include a ‘former music director of Strictly; Mountainscape who play instrumental post-metal; Theo Travis of Soft Machine, who has played saxophone and flute with numerous jazz and prog bands; Tim Bowness and Butterfly Mind; and Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate.

Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets at Manchester Apollo
Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets

Prog History Brought to Life

The late 1960s to the mid-1970s were arguably the golden era of Prog Rock, particularly in the UK, but as can be seen from the reviews above, the genre continues to thrive, with superb new music being produced both on record and live.

New life has also been breathed into prog rock classics, with the return of Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets with live interpretations of early Pink Floyd songs. Robin A Smith continued to tour Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells – the 50th anniversary, with a stunning new arrangement of the classic album; 2024 was also the 50th anniversary of the release of Peter Hammill’s solo album The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage, from which the epic track ‘A Louse is not a Home‘ is taken.

Special Thanks

With thanks to Jerry Ewing and Prog magazine for keeping the prog flag flying, and to Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs for his tireless contribution to the live scene in London.

For an overview of the year in classical music in 2024, click here.

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Prog the Forest 2024 – Live Review

Sunday 1 December 2024

The Fiddler’s Elbow, Camden, London

An excitingly eclectic mix of prog bands perform to raise funds for an environmental charity

On a wet Sunday afternoon in early December, intrepid prog rock fans and supporters travelled from South London to North London… and also from Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium – and Manchester (your correspondent). This was a full day’s music festival without mud and dodgy toilets. There was a well-stocked bar, a small stage with an excellent sound and enough seats for those who didn’t fancy standing through sets by no fewer than seven bands and solo artists.

The event was jointly hosted by Malcolm Galloway of prog favourites Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, who was the MC for the festival, and Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs. Mark Gatland, the bass player in Hats Off, stage managed and helped organise the event. All performers gave their services for free to support the rainforest and wildlife conservation charity, World Land Trust, which ‘protects the world’s most biologically significant and threatened habitats.’ This was the sixth year of Prog the Forest and the most successful to date, raising £2750 to protect nearly 26 acres of rainforest and other threatened habitats.

“We’ve just sent £2570 to the World Land Trust from Prog The Forest 2024, enough to protect almost 26 acres of rainforest and other threatened habitats, in co-operation with local communities. That takes our cumulative PTF total to over 89 acres.“

Malcolm Galloway, on behalf of Prog the Forest

Malcolm Galloway entertained the audience in between acts with acre-related facts and fun quizzes. We learned that oxen need two shoes per hoof as, unlike horses (but similar to the Devil), they have cloven hooves. Before the invention of the yoke, the blood supply to a horse’s head was cut off with unfortunate consequences. As one band member quipped, ‘You wouldn’t get this at a Taylor Swift gig.’ Well, quite.

Spriggan Mist. Image © Mark Gatland

The first band was Spriggan Mist, a ‘pagan progressive rock band.’ In real life, lead singer Fay Brotherhood is a ‘professional ecologist and bat worker’, and she was on message with her splendid forest-related headgear, which featured forest greenery, antlers and flashing lights. An antler-related incident occurred when Brotherhood hit the mic with her headgear, causing a howl of feedback. The rest of the band are Baz Cilia on bass and vocals, Maxine Cilia on guitar, saxophone, woodwind and vocals, Neil Wighton on guitar and Ali Soueidan on drums.

Introducing the song Kintbury Witch, Fay Brotherhood asked, “Any witches in the house?” “Me”, came the reply from a female voice at the back.

Opening song Isambard was uplifting heavy rock, with Floydian guitar solos of epic length. The Portal was written the day the immortal David Bowie died, an upbeat pop song with a nice melodic bass line, lute-like guitar and fierce drumming. Coloured lights on Brotherhood’s gloves lit up in appreciation of the music. Brighid was more downbeat, Brotherhood – with her vibrato vocals, exciting headgear and compelling stage presence -reminding some audience members of the great Lili-Marlene Premilovich, better known as Lene Lovich.

Multi-instrumentalist Maxine Cilia also reminded us of the late ’70s/early ’80s by introducing a Keytar (pedants will note that the name wasn’t used until 2012) on When Stars Collide; she also played the saxophone later in the song. The next song, Ianatores Teresteres, began with a fuzz-guitar riff reminiscent of the 1973 single Radar Love by Golden Earring. Maxine Cilia further demonstrated her versatility by playing a heavily-echoed recorder. The band ended an exhilarating and highly theatrical set with Kintbury Witch, Brotherhood dancing enthusiastically with animal skulls, which she held in either hand to illustrate a witches’ ceremony.

Leoni Jane Kennedy. Image © Mark Gatland

Singer-songwriter Leoni Jane Kennedy was hand-picked by members of Queen for the Freddie Mercury Scholarship. She has supported Rush tribute band Moving Pictures with acoustic covers of Rush songs. She started her set with a cover of ‘Kid Gloves’ from Grace Under Pressure (1984), singing in a lovely low, sultry voice and accompanying herself with virtuoso strumming and versatile picking on her acoustic guitar. She played a gorgeous, melancholy cover of ‘Tears’ from Rush’s 1976 album 2112. She also covered ‘New World Man’ from Signals (1982), judiciously changing its name to ‘New World Woman’, the title of her 2023 album.

Leoni Jane Kennedy asked the audience if anyone had heard of Rush’s 1976 album 2112. When she got an enthusiastic response she said, “I’m in the right room!”

Kennedy also writes her own songs. On Temple, she demonstrated the full range of her voice, with lovely legato singing, and nice guitar harmonics at the end. She held the audience spellbound with Life Like This, which had interesting chord changes and a nice harmonic structure. Her best song was Ammunition, written as part of her Master’s in Songwriting. Although written to a brief, this was a beautiful, poignant song about her relationship with her father, ‘You weren’t there to watch me grow.’ With her soulful voice, superb guitar playing, and charismatic stage presence, Kennedy deserves to go far.

MC Galloway teased us by introducing a group of five Russian composers, Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin, sometimes known as ‘The Mighty Handful’ or the (partially famous) Five who apparently ‘changed the perception of time in their music’. This concept would appeal to prog fans, who love a complex time signature.

The Mighty Handful. Image © Mark Gatland

MC Galloway announced The Mighty Handful as including a ‘former music director of Strictly‘. We were now firmly into prog territory, with time signatures on songs like Vital Signs and Exit Piece that even the best Strictly dancers would have struggled to illustrate through the medium of interpretive dance. Ralph Blackbourn on keyboards made a stunning impression of Rick Wakeman in several songs, although sadly without the cape (the Uncaped Crusader?) And on Cavalier Spirit, he channelled the cavalier spirit of the great Jon Lord (Deep Purple) on bluesy Hammond organ.

“We’re here for the trees”, announced Matt Howes of The Mighty Handful. Faster than lightning in a rainforest, the response came back from the audience, “The trees can’t be here!”

Matt Howes was a mesmerising frontman, singing in a rock style on Cavalier Spirit and in a stratospheric falsetto on a new song, All the Birds, which he quipped wouldn’t be released until 2026 to avoid putting pressure on themselves. Guitarist Christopher James Harrison brought some fine playing to the driving guitar rock of Hypothetically Speaking from the band’s epic concept album Still Sitting in Danny’s Car, which Howes described as ‘going on and on’. Bass player Tom Halley, a member of a barbershop quartet in another life, brought funky bass lines and then beautifully cascading lines to Distant as the Stars. Howe introduced The Signal (ii) as a difficult song that ‘might go wrong’. The song was, in fact, superbly executed, with a proggy start, a funky keyboard solo from Blackbourn, and a spacey section with complex polyrhythms. At the end of the piece, Blackbourn leapt with joy, and the audience shared in the sheer exuberance of the band’s performance.

According to their Facebook page, Mountainscape play, ‘Instrumental post-metal. We blend elements of post-rock, black metal, doom, sludge and ambient in a filmscore inspired way.’ For those in the audience who were post-metal curious, Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs announced the three-piece as ‘prog adjacent or modern prog’ and said that they had been written up in Prog magazine; as Parkins said, if Jerry Ewing, Prog’s Editor, said they are prog they must be. Talking to band members later, they admitted playing a ‘softer’ set than their usual metal offering. Perhaps, in honour of the occasion, the band should have changed their name from Mountainscape to Treescape (although apparently some mountains do have rainforests growing on them).  

Mountainscape. Image © Mark Gatland

Mountainscape consists of Dan Scrivener on guitar, Ethan Bishop on bass, and James Scrivener on drums, but the band’s sound was so full that they often sounded like a much bigger band. Atoms Unfurling began with ambient, spacey sounds and military drumming, then soaring, anthemic guitar. There was some black metal riffing at the end, but not enough to frighten the horses of prog – there were strong melodies that belied the band’s description of their music as ‘sludge’. On Iridescent, they lived up to their description. They created a compelling soundtrack for an imaginary film or video game, with a soaring, legato guitar solo with a few nicely proggy corners. Supernova featured some thrillingly evocative key changes, and Belonging began with a halo of tranquil electronics followed by deep, visceral bass and uplifting black metal riffs. The band’s exhilarating and prog-friendly set ended with the low-slung groove of Patterns in the Mist.

During the interval (or should that be a Winterval?), the audience went off to forage in the forest for food… or perhaps to comb the streets of Camden, while there were sound checks for the festival’s second half.

Theo Travis. Image © Mark Gatland

Theo Travis is a member of Soft Machine and has played saxophone and flute with numerous jazz and prog bands; the list of musicians he has collaborated with reads like a who’s who of jazz and prog. He also played duduk – a wind instrument with a large double reed, originally from Armenia – on‘ Beautiful Scarecrow’ on Steven Wilson’s last solo album, The Harmony Codex. His latest solo album is the beguiling Aeolus: One Hour Duduk Meditation, with ‘Production and Soundscapes’ by Steven Wilson. Last Sunday, he treated us to a short set for solo flute, made up of five evocative pieces. He used a loop pedal extensively to create harmonies and multi-layered trance-like themes. He also used flutter tonguing above stately melodies, sounding like a delicate butterfly or a bird’s wings fluttering. Sometimes, the effect was deliciously unsettling; elsewhere, the melodies sounded medieval and ineffably sad. He also created mesmerisingly deep organ notes. In the final piece, he played a stately riff, with complex flourishes above, building multiple parts that at one point sounded like one of Bach’s two-part inventions. A spellbinding set.

At the start of his set, Tim Bowness invited us to visualise dry ice and the epic strains of German composer Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra (the ‘theme music’ for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Then it was the turn of Prog Royalty to grace the stage – Tim Bowness was one-half of no-man with Steven Wilson (or originally one-third of the band that also consisted of violinist Ben Coleman, who played violin on The Harmony Codex). He introduced his band Butterfly Mind, saying they first played together in a five-minute soundcheck during the interval. The band consisted of Andrew Booker (drums), who had joined at very short notice, Rob Groucutt (keyboards), John Jowitt (bass) and Matt Stevens (guitar). Theo Travis, ‘dressed for the occasion’ in an elegant smoking jacket (if that’s the correct term; this Blog shouldn’t be relied on for fashion tips), played on some songs.

Tim Bowness and Butterfly Mind. Image © Mark Gatland

The band began with a blistering version of ‘Time Travel in Texas’ from no-man’s 1996 album Wild Opera, with a scorchingly funky bass line and an amazingly virtuosic guitar solo. Bowness was in fine voice here and throughout the set. The band were incredibly tight, despite their lack of time together. Next was ‘All the Blue Changes’ from no-man’s Together We’re Stranger (2003), which began with delicate piano and guitar and morphed into a punk/indie rock anthem. There was a change of pace for ‘Wherever There is Light’ from 2008’s classic no-man album Schoolyard Ghosts – which also contains the classic Pigeon Drummer –  the band’s last album before 2019’s Love You to Bits. Bowness’ voice was a soft-grained wonder on this track. Theo Travis on flute provided a simple melodic theme that was very different from his solo set, with a gorgeous tone; the second time round, he decorated the song with delicate, filigree ornaments. Another early highlight was ‘Sing to Me’ from Tim Bowness’s third solo album, Stupid Things That Mean the World (2015). Bowness’ voice was pure, sweet and thoughtful. The band brought warm backing vocals, loose-limbed and relaxed drumming, gorgeous piano and bass flourishes, a lovely echoey guitar solo, and a heart-stopping key change after the words ‘the way she looked at you.’

‘Rainmark’  from Bowness’ fifth solo album, Flowers At The Scene (2019), included the lyrics, ‘I would save you/From the coming flood’, giving him the chance to meditate wittily on the floods that had come to his adopted home of Bradford on Avon, which apparently were so bad that from his house on the hill, the Co-op could only be reached ‘by dinghy’. and there was ‘no Ocado for three days!’ More remarkable than these First World Problems was the final acapella section of the song, with stunning drumming from Booker, effectively a drum solo with amazingly complex rhythms. The band were joined again by the ‘elegantly attired’ Travis for a stunning version of no-man’s 1993 single Sweetheart Raw. He played warm, low saxophone, then let rip with a fluid but angular jazz solo, playing an extraordinary number of notes in a very short time. Travis played soulful flute on ‘Mixtaped’ from Schoolyard Ghosts, then fiercely passionate sax. The song ended with Bowness’ beautiful solo voice. Travis rounded off ‘Things Change’ from no-man’s Flowermouth (1994) with a jazzy flourish while Stevens held his guitar aloft in triumph.

To close the festival, MC Galloway was joined onstage by Mark Gatland from Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate. The band began with a world-exclusive premiere of ‘Certainty’ from their new album, The Uncertainty Principle. The song was a showpiece for Galloway’s superb guitar playing, ranging from a lyrical Floydian solo to jazzy, offbeat playing and an epic, bluesy solo. The band were joined by Galloway’s wife, the flautist Kathryn Thomas, on Century Rain. Having already heard Theo Travis on flute, all we needed was Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson to complete the prog flute trio, but perhaps he was busy recording voiceovers and flute for the next Opeth album. Unlike Anderson, Thomas played while standing on both legs, but more importantly, her solo was wonderfully florid, matched by Galloway’s equally ornate solo, while Gatland provided viscerally robust bass.

Gatland introduced ‘Walking to Aldebaran’ from Hats Off’s last album, The Light of Ancient Mistakes, as ‘the hardest, slightly maddest’ song of the set, combining as it does prog metal and Andrew Lloyd Webber, all in nine minutes! The song began with fierce prog metal riffing, then Hendrix-style guitar. Galloway sang with Bowie-like passion. Another fearsome prog-metal section led to a melodic passage that could have come from a West End musical. The song ended with melancholy piano and a haunting guitar solo, giving it a dystopian feel like many of the band’s songs.

The highlight of the set was another song from the new album, ‘Between Two Worlds’, about somebody waiting for the result of a scan. Galloway explained that this puts the patient metaphorically in the position of Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously well and not well, while awaiting a diagnosis. Galloway explained that on the new album, the song will be a piano ballad, but as he can’t carry a keyboard to gigs he played a guitar version instead. The result was a moving, contemplative ballad, Galloway singing with compassionate empathy while Gatland and the audience listened respectfully. As Gatland quipped, it was ‘the feel-good hit of the summer.’

In common with much of the finest prog rock, the band’s subject matter is frequently depressing, but there was also joy and passion in their playing. In the final song, My Clockwork Heart, they were joined onstage by Chris Parkins, who smiled and nodded along and then joined in the chorus. This brief moment of joy summed up the spirit of the whole festival. There was genuine camaraderie – other musicians stayed and watched the other bands, and some performers from previous years came to watch, too. Many of the musicians chatted with the audience members after their sets; at times, it felt like an amiable networking event for prog rockers and their fans… Bring on Prog the Forest 2025!

Update at 14.04 on Sunday 15 December 2024: The next Prog the Forest one day festival will take place on Saturday 6 December 2025.

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Double Bill: Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate and EBB – Live Review

Hats Off Gentleman It's Adequate and Ebb at The Camden Club

Monday 22 July 2024

The Camden Club, London

****

A more than ‘adequate’ set from a dynamic duo. Dramatic ebb and flow from Prog’s Best New Band of 2023

Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate performing at Camden Club
Mark Gatland and Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate

Situated opposite The Roundhouse on Chalk Farm Road, The Camden Club describes itself as ‘the newest venue to hit London’s iconic music scene’, hosting ‘the best live music in London.’ It’s a lovely venue, with a long bar along one side, a slightly raised stage with built-in lighting, seating for around 100 people and an at-seat food service. It has an excellent sound system, expertly managed at last Monday’s gig by sound engineer Tamara Sterle.

Last Monday evening’s gig was a prog double-header, featuring Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, and EBB who won Prog’s Best New Band last year. Hats Off front man Malcolm Galloway told Nick Holmes Music in a recent interview that when playing live he and bass player Mark Gatland concentrate on songs with vocals rather than the instrumentals that pepper their studio albums. At the last minute they adapted their set from their previous appearance at Prog for Peart in Abingdon (see setlist below) so that all the piano songs came first. As the venue opened, Galloway was still sound checking a new song ‘Hydrogen’ from the forthcoming album The Uncertainty Principle, in which the protagonist is stuck in an MRI scanner wondering what the test results will reveal. The poignant words describe the anxiety of ‘waiting between two worlds’. Galloway said there wouldn’t be time to play it in the main set, and in any case the song is ‘utterly depressing’, but it did give a hint of the thoughtful music we can expect from the next album.

Galloway was soon joined on stage by bass player Mark Gatland, sporting a glove on his right hand like a latter-day Alvin Stardust, leaping in the air as he played like an excitable punk rocker. An early highlight from the piano-based section was ‘Cygnus’, a soulful song with a moving piano intro. Galloway, a former hospital doctor gave an affecting account of how in his view the 2017 Cygnus Report into a possible future pandemic was ignored in relation to the provision of PPE during COVID. ‘Here Comes the Flood’ featured a mournful piano, heartfelt vocals and a sensitive fretless bass sound. A lovely song, with a beautiful harmonic progression.

Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate at The Camden Club

The piano was duly despatched from the stage, and Galloway was unleashed to play his PRS guitar, with epic Floydian tones on ‘Walking to Aldebaran’, and the title track from The Light of Ancient Mistakes. There was a punky version of ‘One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov)’, reviewed here in the Off The Beaten Track series. It’s a fascinating song that describes how Arkhipov’s decision probably averted World War III. Gatland quipped that he was happy to play a song about a nuclear apocalypse. He was quick to qualify his comment;- he was happy because war was avoided. This was followed by the industrial funk of ‘All Empires Fall’, a song which describes the concept that, as Galloway puts it, ‘At the most basic level, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that any conquest is ultimately temporary’. It’s an poetic trope (the falling of empires, not the second law of thermodynamics) that dates back many centuries to poems like the late ninth century Anglo Saxon works The Wanderer and The Seafarer, and beyond. The set ended with ‘Century Rain’, which began as a slow-burn ballad which transformed to full-on prog with Galloway’s voice almost cracking with emotion, and a spectacularly energetic guitar solo.

Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate Setlist for The Camden Club
The setlist for Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate. Courtesy of Mark Gatland

If Hats Off… lit up the room with their passion and dedication, EBB created a different, more theatrical vibe, the prog equivalent of the indie band The Last Dinner Party another up and coming female band who are flamboyantly dressed on stage, the difference being that EBB have a male bass player, the superbly virtuosic Bad Dog.

EBB at Camden Club
EBB: left to right:  Suna Dasi, Bad Dog (almost hidden), Erin Bennet, Nikki Francis, 
Kitty Biscuits, Anna Fraser. Photo courtesy Doug Wregg

The six members of EBB were joined on stage by a flowers (‘a flower?’) as was Myrkur in her recent London gig. More significantly, the Seventh EBB, known only as ‘Jenny’, joined the band on stage dressed in various theatrical outfits. The set began with a coup de théâtre, Jenny dressed as a jester animating the members of the band, lifting them from their knees and bringing them to life.

EBB at Camden Club
EBB at Camden Club

Images courtesy of Doug Wregg

The band follow the best traditions of prog rock, exhibiting a restless ambition that makes them hard to put in a convenient musical box, truly progressive in the best sense of the word. The theatricality of their stage show is matched by the musicianship – front woman Erin Bennet is a fine guitarist and singer, Suna Dasi provides atmospheric keyboards and evocative backing vocals, Nikki Francis brings precise keyboard textures and some lyrical sax, and Anna Fraser is an excellent drummer. Kitty Biscuits brings charisma and drama to the set, with spoken word sections and operatic backing vocals, sometimes ululating like Yoko Ono. When the three vocalists sang together, the effect was extraordinary.

EBB played whole of their new three-track EP, The Management of Consequences and several tracks from their first album Mad & Killing Time (2022). Highlights of the set included ‘Silent Saviour’ with an ambient start that moved to some deliciously proggy keyboards, rocky guitar and vocals, with added sax and a final guitar and bass unison flourish. There was a delightful funky, metallic syncopated riff in ‘Tension’, and we were introduced to a brand new piece ‘No One’s Child’.

A teaser of No One’s Child

The set ended with ‘Mary Jane’, a rousing song that reminded us that strong, simple melodies and vocal harmonies are always an important aspect of the best prog rock, as well as instrumental pyrotechnics. The audience demanded an encore, and EBB obliged with ‘Hecate’, with its grand prog metal riffs, liquid, undulating piano flourishes, and dramatic vocals from Kitty Biscuit.

Malcolm Galloway returned to the stage at the end to thank everyone for coming, and to stress the importance of live music. Audiences shouldn’t need too much persuading to come out when the venue, sound, music and performances are as good as this. Hats Off… brought cerebral drama and passion, and EBB brought musical and physical drama with the help of their seventh, silent member playing several different characters. What united both bands was the sheer joy in live music that they brought to the stage.

This blog was republished at 17.55 on Monday 29 July to replace a previous version that had minor edits and the final section missing; further minor edits were made at 22.47.

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

Malcolm Galloway singing and playing live

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

Malcolm Galloway singing and playing live

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. 

Vasili Arkhipov - Image courtesy of Olga Arkhipova
Vasily Arkhipov – Image courtesy of Olga Arkhipova

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. 

The Cover of The Confidence Trick by Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate

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. 

Dr Werner Heisenberg
Prof. Dr Werner Heisenberg. image provided to Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archive

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

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland

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…

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland
Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland

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!” 

Photo of the composer Frederic Chopin
Polish composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin.
Photograph by Louis-Auguste Bisson (1849).
Source: Wikimedia Commons

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.  

The cover of Invisible by Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate

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 cover of Hats Off When the Kill Code Fails by Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate

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.  

The Cover of Broken but Still Standing by Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate

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.  

Pain Scale from 1 to 10
Pain Scale with Words from Wikimedia Commons , by MissLunaRose12

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. 

The Cover of I'm Tired and Everything Hurts by Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate
The cover of the charity single I’m Tired And Everything Hurts

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.  

The Cover of One Word That Means the World (Arkhipov)
The cover of One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov)

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.

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Off the Beaten Track #7: One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov) by Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate

The Cover of One Word That Means the World (Arkhipov)
The Cover of One Word That Means the World (Arkhipov)

The latest single from London-based prog rock band, Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate is taken from their eighth studio album The Uncertainty Principle due to be released later in 2024. It’s called One Word That Means The World (Vasily Arkhipov).

The band enjoy a high concept for their songs – their previous album The Light of Ancient Mistakes included songs on the Cold War, English MPs’ discovery of Hitler’s atrocities, and the  miserable childhood of author John le Carré.

The new song is dedicated to the Soviet naval officer Vasily Arkhipov (pictured below). During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Arkhipov was onboard a B-59 submarine, part of a flotilla stationed near Cuba, hiding so deep in the sea that it hadn’t received radio signals from Moscow for several days. When the US Navy began to drop depth charges to try to force the submarine to the surface, the captain and the political officer, assuming that they were now at war with the US, made the decision to launch their T-5 nuclear torpedo. Arkhipov managed to persuade the others not to launch the nuclear weapon but to surface and obtain orders from Moscow. The submarine was then ordered to return to Soviet territory. Arguably, Arkhipov’s brave action saved the world from nuclear war – the simple Russian word ‘nyet’ (‘no’) was the ‘one word that means the world’.

Arkhipov’s clear-headed decision is even more remarkable for being taken in extreme physical conditions. The submarine’s batteries were failing; there was no air conditioning and the heat was extreme; high levels of carbon dioxide caused feelings of suffocation and panic. Yet on their return home the crew were treated as if they had let their country down, although Arkhipov did rise to the rank of vice admiral in the Soviet navy before he retired in 1988.

Vasili Arkhipov - Image courtesy of Olga Arkhipova

Vasily Arkhipov – Image courtesy of Olga Arkhipova

Arkhipov’s predicament is soon turned into a much wider existential crisis in the song’s lyrics which begin with specifics but soon widen to the haunting refrain,

We don’t know who we are till we’re forced to decide/We don’t know what’s inside

The song begins in medias res, with a spiky, slightly frenetic guitar solo, immediately evoking the claustrophobic setting, ‘trapped beneath the waves … The burning lifeless air…’ The sense of intense claustrophobia is enhanced by the octave doubling on the vocals, similar to the vocal effect on Pink Floyd’s ‘Welcome to the Machine’ from their 1975 album Wish You Were Here. There’s also a rising synth motif which has a similar tonal quality to the treated piano part at the opening of Echoes from Pink Floyd’s Meddle (1971), evoking the sonar from the submarine.

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland

The doubling of the vocal line stops during the chorus, creating a more intimate feel, showing that the words ‘We don’t know who we are…’ are more personal to Arkhipov’s situation, whilst at the same time being of more universal relevance by using the word ‘we’ rather than addressing him directly. That changes again at the end of the chorus when Arkhipov is directly addressed with the poignant words, ‘That was the day when you said no.’

There’s a further shift in of point of view with the words ‘That was years ago, and now I’m told I’m a hero.’ We are now seeing events from Arkhipov’s perspective, and the vocals become more restrained and thoughtful. The point of view then switches to the universal ‘we’ and back to Arkhipov again in the first-person singular. There’s a powerful guitar solo, again suggesting the anguish Arkhipov must have suffered when making his decision. The song ends with Arkhipov’s poignant words, ‘I found out when I said no.’ It’s a fine song, a worthy and passionate tribute to a brave man. to whom the single is dedicated.

Personnel

Music by Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland

Lyrics by Malcolm Galloway

Malcolm Galloway – vocals, guitars, producer, mixing, mastering

Mark Gatland – bass guitar, co-producer, vocal engineer

Artwork by Malcolm Galloway, made with DALLE-3 (AI art) and Photoshop.

The B-side of the single is the instrumental ‘Music For Dancing’ – Written and performed by Malcolm Galloway (guitar, synths/keyboards, producer, mastering) and Mark Gatland (bass guitar, synths, co-producer).

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The Light of Ancient Mistakes by Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate – Album Review

The cover of The Light of Ancient Mistakes by Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate

A compelling mix of science fiction with the personal and the political

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The core of the modestly-named prog rock band Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate consists of Malcolm Galloway (vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and producer) and Mark Gatland (bass, backing vocals, keyboards and co-producer). Their latest album, The Light of Ancient Mistakes isn’t a concept album as such, but it contains multiple overlapping themes, including politics, history, current affairs, failure of communication, threat, and the mistakes humans have made…and continue to make – as Oscar Wilde said in 1891 in his philosophical novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes“

There’s also a strong science fiction influence on the album, particularly the award-winning British novelist Adrian Tchaikovsky. The longest track on the album, ‘Walking to Aldebaran’ is inspired by Tchaikovsky’s novella of the same name, and some of the instrumental tracks on the album take their titles from characters in Tchaikovsky’s books, such as ‘Avrana Kern’ (from Children of Time) and ‘Gothi and Gethli’ (from Children of Memory). Philip K Dick is also referenced, in the instrumental track ‘The Man Who Japed’, Dick’s 1956 science fiction novel.

Like the best science fiction, The Light of Ancient Mistakes urgently engages with contemporary issues. Galloway says that the track ‘Walking to Aldebaran’ was partly inspired by the dehumanisation of our enemies that enabled guards at Auschwitz to regard their victims as monsters, just as the Tchaikovsky novella describes the transformation of a man into a monster.

There’s another literary source, for the track ‘The Glamour Boys’ which takes its name from the book by Chris Bryant, the MP for Rhondda. The Glamour Boys is subtitled ‘The Secret Story of the Rebels who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler.’ It tells the story of a group of young, queer MPs who revealed the extent of Hitler’s brutality well before the Second World War and were branded ‘the glamour boys’ by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to suggest there was something untoward about them. The song is sung from the perspective of one of the MPs.

The political, in a much wider sense, is also the inspiration behind ‘Sold the Peace’ which describes politicians who won the Cold War but ‘sold the peace.’ The title track, ‘The Light of Ancient Mistakes’ is inspired by Iain M Banks’ novel ‘Look to Windward’ published in 2000. The protagonist of the song is an artificial intelligence, who according to Galloway is ‘trying to show the futility of cycles of hatred to someone planning an act of mass destruction.’ The book describes an explosion that destroys the sun, and ‘Burn the World’ looks at the effect of catastrophic climate change (see the review of that track here in the new Off the Beaten Track series).

The more personal is reflected in the track ‘Sixteen Hugless Years’, which movingly describes the emotionally-starved childhood of the late spy novelist John le Carré who was beaten by his father and abandoned by his mother. And the most personal track on the album is ‘imtiredandeverythinghurts’ a heartful cry of pain from Galloway who has what he describes as the ‘invisible disability’, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome which causes chronic pain. Both of these songs are much more direct than others on the album, approaching punk in their delivery rather than prog. This is entirely appropriate – as John Lennon once said in response to those critics who criticised the simplicity of the lyrics to his song ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy’) from The Beatles’ White Album (1968), if you are drowning you don’t shout that you would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to throw you a rope; you simply scream.

If those two songs are very simple, there is plenty for prog fans to enjoy elsewhere. In particular the complex bass guitar and keyboards lines are a highlight, as are the Floydian guitar solos in several songs. Galloway’s vocals are compelling too, sometimes reminiscent of Tim Bowness of no-man; elsewhere there’s a touch of the urgency and yearning of Bowie – the vocals on ‘Sixteen Hugless Years’ have something of the feel of Bowie’s Five Years from Ziggy Stardust (1972). The album is nicely paced too, with gorgeous widescreen instrumentals like ‘The Requisitioner and the Wonder’, and several versions of ‘The Anxiety Machine’, interspersing the vocal tracks. And ‘Walking to Aldebaran’ is a multi-faceted drama in its own right. A thoughtful, highly literate and political album that forms a very satisfying and coherent whole.

Sources

Notes by Malcolm Galloway

The John Lennon interview with Rolling Stone magazine by Jann S. Wenner, 4 February 1971