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Interview – Jan Vogler, Cellist and Artistic Director of Dresden Music Festival

Jan Vogler © Marco Grob

Jan Vogler

Jan Vogler travels the world as an internationally acclaimed cello soloist. He was in the UK in February to perform with various orchestras, including a superb performance of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 with the Hallé in Manchester under the baton of Kahchun Wong. He has been Artistic Director of Dresdner Musikfestspiele (Dresden Music Festival) since 2009. The annual Festival was established by government decree in 1978 when Dresden was still part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Nick Holmes Music spoke to Jan in New York via Zoom earlier this month.

The Dresden Music Festival

Nick Holmes Music: How did you become involved in the Dresden Music Festival? 

Jan Vogler: I developed an interest in festivals in the 1990s. I was very lucky to be a guest artist at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, directed by Rudolf Serkin, when I was a young man. And Serkin was very interested in Eastern European players. He really helped me to get out of East Germany, which was very difficult, to come to Marlboro. And when I came to Marlboro, I saw the combination of excellent musicians, good programming, and a summer atmosphere, and I understood what a festival was right away.  

After four summers in Marlboro, I founded the Moritzburg Festival in 1993, together with my brother Kai and a friend who’s also a cellist, Peter Bruns. We learned about financing, ticketing, organisational skills, stage crews, and all the details one needs to know. And by about 2001, I had taken over the running of the festival.

“I like organising…”

I had installed an office in Dresden, had a couple of non-profits supporting the festival, and learned how to direct a festival. Even if you’re called ‘artistic director’, it means you are the one everybody will call when they don’t know what to do. I was fine with that. I like organising. I was always interested in the process: how does music get from the musician to the audience? Because it’s a process that in the 19th century involved musicians much more than today – think about Clara Schumann writing out her own tickets for concerts and inviting guests by handwritten letter.

At the end of the 20th century, we became a kind of protected species, soloists who travel around the world, everybody arranges everything for you, and you’re supposed to just think about your concert. I never really liked that. I wanted to get my hands dirty, wanted to understand how it works, and see if I could help bring the music to the audience in a more innovative way. And that was all expressed in the Moritzburg Festival.

Then in 2007, the mayor of Dresden invited me for lunch, and he said, “Would you be interested in taking over the Dresden Festival?” The festival was not doing too well, and my first thought was, should I really do this? Should I really cut out more time from my playing career to dedicate to the festival? But a lot of people around me, including family and friends, were excited that this would be a great thing for me to apply some of my ideas. 

The Dresden Music Festival © Stephan Floss

I took the job and started in 2009, and we rebuilt the festival in a more modern way with more entrepreneurial involvement. I wanted to make sure that I applied everything I’d learned in America with the Marlboro Festival, that you can do a festival even if there’s no defined space from the government funding for it before. So I applied some of those experiences to my work with the Dresden Music Festival, and now we have a festival that is up to 80% financed by ticket income and sponsorship, which is very high for Germany and very unusual. So this way we could enlarge our budget, have more wonderful musicians come, and have a more glorious festival.

Artistic Changes

Nick Holmes Music: What’s changed artistically under your control? 

Jan Vogler: A lot. My vision was always to both observe changes in classical music that are coming anyway, and at the same time bringing my own ideas to the table. I think every director who ignores the trends in classical music will sooner or later have a problem because the audience is our main supporter. But at the same time, adjusting to what the audience is asking you to do is not always right, because they also want to be led a little bit, and they want the music to be curated as well. So I think finding a good combination of those took about five years. 

I started with very high-quality music; I invited all my friends. At this point, my career was going pretty well, so I could invite lots of partners, like Hélène Grimaud, with whom I played duos. Or the New York Philharmonic. I had just played my debut in 2005 and toured with them. So I could ask Zarin Mehta [president and executive director of the New York Philharmonic]. It was a bit scary. He was a very, very strong leader. I wrote an e-mail: “Would you consider coming with the New York Philharmonic to Dresden?” He was like, “Sure, we could come. It will cost a lot of money, but we can raise it together.” And that brought the festival back on the map and also helped with sponsorships and ticket sales.

Other Genres Apart from Classical Music

But then I thought, what about other genres, such as crossover created for example by the Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin album [Hush, 1992]. Crossover was already well-established, but it was blooming, and people were listening to playlists across different genres. So I really focused on having all these genres present and started with world music from people like Anushka Shankar. I went to jazz, and even did some rock because I liked British rock music from my childhood on. I’m a big fan of Queen and Eric Clapton.

Eric Clapton came to a concert in London. He didn’t come backstage, but I heard he was there. And then he came backstage at another concert in Edinburgh, and I recognised him, and I was like… starstruck. But then we talked about how strings feel under the fingers, and he asked me how cello strings differ from guitar strings, and he was very interested. I texted him: “Would you consider coming to Dresden to play a concert?” He said, “Yes, if you play along with me.” So we made a deal.

“Classical listeners still whistle pop songs in the shower”

Then I was in London for a Wigmore Hall concert. I had studied all his songs and had studied a little bit of rock and blues. I was super nervous, but everything went well in the rehearsal, and then we played together in the concert. And I really internalised that the same audience that would buy tickets to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra or the LSO would buy tickets to the Eric Clapton show. It was not a different audience. It was, of course, some new people, but I realised that classical listeners still whistle pop songs in the shower. It was a great honour that Sting came, another hero of mine. 

Nick Holmes Music: Was it important to you that Sting is a fellow bass player, playing at the low end of the music? 

Jan Vogler: Exactly. I always thought of Sting as his own musical life insurance, the bass line. There was this fantastic bass guitarist in Eric Clapton’s band, and he was my life insurance. I looked at him all the time. If he played a certain note, I knew I was in the right key. But wonderful musicians.

I’m still curious how we can be inventive and progressive with our festival, and I think it helps me that I live in New York, because the two cities are very different. Dresden is a cultural icon and incredibly dense culturally. New York is more artificial because it’s not grown as naturally here, but it’s incredibly lively and incredibly high quality, just like the big British cities like London or Manchester. So it helps me to have this perspective because lots of things will fall through if I look through my New York glasses at the programmes.  

“Some human values come into play, which, for me, is important to convey through music; values that are in danger of being lost in every generation“

I want to bring the idea of a globalised cultural world that is still extremely specific in specific places, like, for example, the sound of the Hallé Orchestra compared to the LPO [London Philharmonic Orchestra]. This is wonderful, these differences, but we still have to see it in context, especially when you do a festival. What is so different about the orchestra and the sound, and which repertoire suits them? How can I host a special cultural event in Dresden that represents a certain culture with all its refinements, while still giving you an idea of how big and beautiful our whole world is? So it’s an idea of tolerance, too, and some human values come into play, which, for me, is important to convey through music; values that are in danger of being lost in every generation.

Elgar and the LPO at the Festival

Edward Elgar. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Nick Holmes Music: And talking of the LPO, they’ve got a residency at the festival, haven’t they?  

Jan Vogler: That’s very exciting. At first, I think my team was a bit shocked when the idea of an all-Elgar residency came about. The LPO said Edward Gardner [Principal Conductor] would like to do two complete days of Elgar. And I was like, “That is a great idea.” And everybody was shocked. They were very silent. My two artistic administrators looked at me like, “What did he smoke?” I said, “Look, who has ever done this in Germany? When did you last hear an Elgar symphony?” And the LPO are masters of this music. They really know this music better than most performers in the whole world. So why don’t we do it?” And it’s selling very well. So I’m very happy.

Edward Gardner. Photo by Mark Allan

Nick Holmes Music: I come from the land that was famously “without music” for a long time. And then Elgar came along, and we thought, thank goodness we’ve got a good composer, finally. How is Elgar viewed in continental Europe and in New York as well? Because obviously, I view him very much through English eyes. 

Jan Vogler: That’s an interesting question. I do feel that Elgar is a little bit like a bathroom where the bathtub overflows. I think the BBC Music Magazine named Elgar’s Cello Concerto the most popular cello concerto. I read that while I was in Great Britain playing Elgar last week, because I did play two Elgars, one with the Hallé in Middlesbrough, and one with the LPO in Eastbourne. It was enlightening to play Elgar with British orchestras because it seems so natural. Mostly, they are more modest than an American or German orchestra playing the Elgar, but sometimes it’s very pompous, but naturally pompous. It’s a little bit like British humour, extremely unique somehow, the way Elgar is played.

I feel in some parts of the world, there’s so much excitement about Elgar. I would say the whole of Great Britain, and then big cities outside of the UK. So if the Elgar Cello Concerto is played in Berlin, Paris or New York, it’s very enthusiastically received. I’m going to play it in Taiwan in a couple of weeks. where I think Elgar is played less. So they asked specifically, “Would you be willing to play the Elgar? We haven’t had that for a while.” And I hear that quite often in some regions. But it’s so popular in so many places that I think it’s spreading very fast. That’s why I said it’s like a bathtub overflowing, because if there is enthusiasm in the world for something, somewhere, it always spreads, because we have such fast communications. We have such wonderful ways to communicate these days that this enthusiasm will be communicated, and therefore, I expect Elgar to still grow.

“That was a mistake I made for 25 years. I always played the [Cello Concerto] so seriously and with so much darkness..”

Now in Germany, The Dream of Gerontius is being played here and there, and there are more pieces being picked up by these orchestras. It used to be entirely the Cello Concerto or Enigma Variations, but now it’s really the full Elgar repertoire that is played by the great orchestras around the world. When I play the piece, I feel that the main thing Jacqueline du Pré invented about Elgar, in a way, that made his Cello Concerto so popular, was that she understood it was a dark piece that was about empire falling and about things crumbling at the time when it was written. But she understood that the enthusiasm in it is probably just as strong.

That was a mistake I made for 25 years. I always played it so seriously and with so much darkness and everything. And the audience went, “Thank you” [he claps politely]. And then I thought, hmm, what is missing? Lately I discovered, it’s this enthusiasm that runs throughout the piece – Elgar always gets up again and he tries again, with this kind of counter-stream of positive energy. I feel that British orchestras know that there has to be positivity, even in darkness.

Nick Holmes Music: But in some ways it’s quite playful, isn’t it? 

Jan Vogler: It is quite playful. And we cannot just see this very serious side. Outside of the UK, many, many countries see this as very serious music, and very, very late Romantic. But there is a lot of positive energy that counters that, and then you see the sun, and then you see the clouds closing, and then you see some melancholy, and then it all makes sense. But without this enthusiasm, of which Jacqueline du Pré was the perfect example, the music is not as effective.

Wagner on Period Instruments

Nick Holmes Music: Talking of late 19th-century music takes us to your Wagner project – Götterdämmerung – which is coming up for rehearsal very soon? Tell me about using period instruments in Wagner?

Jan Vogler: Yes, that’s another project that’s a little bit crazy. The outcome was definitely completely unclear when we took it on. But I personally believe very much in period instruments, because my father in East Germany had the early [Nikolaus] Harnoncourt recordings of the Monteverdi operas. So I grew up with these very early Harnoncourt recordings, which were extremely fascinating.

My father was a cellist. Later, he also became a fan of the [Dutch] cellist Anner Bylsma. I found Anner Bylsma’s Bach interpretations, so when I was in school in East Berlin, I was the only one playing these fast tempos in the Bach Cello Suites. And all the teachers were like, “What the hell is he doing?” Because they were still taught by the Russians with these very slow and very heavy tempos.

Dresdner Festspielorchester © Carsten Beier

I studied with Heinrich Schiff, who was close to Harnoncourt and very interested in performance practice. I had a strong interest in bringing the best period instrument groups from all over the world to Dresden, and we did. We founded our own Festival Orchestra playing on gut strings about 12 – 13 years ago, and we thought, what if we get the best players on period instruments to Dresden, and play pieces created in Dresden in the Romantic era, with a different sound from the other orchestras.

That worked well, but it didn’t really make a big wave, because we would have only one or two concerts a year. It would be expensive to get all the musicians, all freelancers, to Dresden: lots of people from the UK, from [John Eliot] Gardiner’s band, and lots of great players from London. That was the first step.

Working with the Conductor Kent Nagano

Kent Nagano and Jan Vogler © Carsten Beier

Then Kent Nagano came to me – we are friends, we have played a lot together – and said, “I have this idea about doing The Ring on period instruments.” I started a little bit with Concerto Köln, but there was no chance because we didn’t have the organisational structure, the funding, or enough players. And I said, “Well, I have the [Dresdner] Festspielorchester, and it’s a fabulous group, and you can bring some of your musicians from Concerto Köln, and then maybe we can combine them, and we can attempt to do the whole Ring. I can try, on the fundraising side, to work with the Federal Government in Berlin and integrate the project into the Festival.”

Finding Period Instruments

Nick Holmes Music: In this context, though, I’m really interested to know what you mean by period instruments? You mentioned gut strings, but the symphony orchestra was pretty much established by the end of the 19th century, wasn’t it? So what are you doing that’s different from a modern symphony orchestra?

Jan Vogler: We found some original Wagner Tubas, which were very different from the ones used today. And wind instruments changed a lot during Wagner’s time; they sound a lot thinner and clearer than the wind instruments used later. The wind players who travel around Europe and play period instruments have four different flutes. They have one for 18th-century repertoire, one for early 19th-century repertoire, one for mid-19th-century repertoire, and one for Wagner. They were very excited.

Some of them collect instruments like crazy. We have a trumpet player who collects anything from percussion instruments to trumpets from this time. And he buys them at auctions for very little money. Some of them are original instruments, but they are no longer playable. There are experts in Germany who rebuild these brass instruments for these period players.

“All these little details make a huge difference when added together.”

The discussion about instruments was very detailed, and we had musicologists. That was Kent’s idea. Kent is a very interesting guy. He’s very academically interested, and his idea was to let the musicologists lead. So we have a little army of musicologists who go into the score and sit in on rehearsals. We have one musicologist, Ursula Hirschfeld, just for language, just for the way the German words were pronounced in Wagner’s time. So she would correct the singers all the time.

And all these little details make a huge difference when added together. I would say not every detail is conceivable when you hear just that one detail. But in the end, it’s stunning that, for example, in Die Walküre, when the fire starts around the mountain where Brünnhilde is captured, I suddenly saw the fire: the sound was fascinating. I saw the fire in front of me.

One of Josef Hoffman’s 14 set designs for Wagner’s Rheingold in 1876. Source: Viktor Angerer, via Wikimedia Commons

At the beginning of Rheingold, there’s a lot about running water, and everybody always says, ” Why does [Wagner] stay in the same key for so long at the beginning, and can you please speed up the tempo?” And many conductors tried to do it just faster. Suddenly, it was incredible, with the three Rheintöchter [Rhine Maidens], you could understand every word.

“[Wagner] said, the theatrical effect is most important. If you can sing it, speak it.”

So certain effects are almost like Debussy was later, very descriptive of nature and other subjects. The transparency of the sound allows the singers to have much more differentiation in dynamics. I’m quoting the musicologist because I haven’t read enough; apparently, Wagner liked pronouncing the words very much, sometimes even as spoken words. He said, the theatrical effect is most important. If you can sing it, speak it

And so musicologists pulled up some recordings from singers who worked with Wagner, for example, songs like Erlkönig. And it’s incredible. They change intonation. When it gets depressed, they go lower. They change the tempo all the time. That’s something Wagner encouraged, he said, “change the tempo as often as you want. If it’s dramatic, go faster. If it’s Romantic, take your time.” We learned almost the opposite: to be strict with the tempo and metronome, stay in this tempo, and be very static.

So all these little revelations would add up. For example, Matthias Naske, the director of the Konzerthaus [in Vienna], came to one of our performances in Amsterdam of Die Walküre, and he said it was maybe the most single, most impactful opera performance of his life. I don’t see it this way because I hear it too often. Kent Nagano is a very modest person. He always says, “Well, Jan, it’s different, right?” So it’s definitely different, I would say!

A Different Type of Singer

Nick Holmes Music: You were talking about singers. Does that mean that you can go for a different type of singer? I mean, we’re all familiar with Wagnerian sopranos and tenors, and the huge voices they have to have to rise above a massive orchestra? 

Jan Vogler: Exactly, with our Siegfried, it was very much like that. But then, of course, our singers get picked up by the Wagner people because they hear that they’re singing with us. So sometimes it’s hard. We discover a lot of talent this way. We have a wonderful young Norwegian Brünnhilde, Åsa Jäger, who is a huge talent. Now we can hardly book her for our complete Ring because she’s making a big career. People observe her, and they hear her, and say, “Oh, we want to have her – we are fine having some influences from [period] performance practices!” So we lose some of them: Derek Welton has become quite famous. He’s a wonderful Wotan, and of course, now the Deutsche Oper [Berlin] or Bayreuth even ask, “Can we have them as Wotan?” I understand. 

Playing the Cello

Jan Vogler with members of The Hallé. Credit: Alex Burns/The Hallé 

Nick Holmes Music: How did you find the cello? Were you following in your father’s footsteps, or was there something personal to you about the cello that attracted you? 

Jan Vogler: It was put in my hands because my brother had the violin. And so, as the middle child, I got the cello, my sister got the piano. I felt a connection right away, a physical connection to the cello. And I really became very competitive to make it sound better. It was pretty clear when I was something like 10 years old that I wanted to be a cellist. And my luck was that I had two musician parents who were very strict and said, “We know you like to play soccer and meet your friends, but if you want to be a serious cellist and not end up in a very, very depressed situation, you have to practice hard.”

So they took my ambition and kind of weaponised it against me in a very good way. And they knew that teenagers can take a lot of work and a lot of pressure . I was very, very lucky when I was studying to feel that, somehow, with the cello, I’d found something special.

Nick Holmes Music: My wife came with me to watch you doing the Shostakovich at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. She said it felt as if the cello was an extension of your own body. Does it feel like that to you? 

Jan Vogler: My ideal is to try to forget that it’s a piece of wood with four strings. I’d like to feel that I can make it come alive. And it helps if you have a good instrument. I am very, very fortunate to have a very, very fine instrument. Of course, it helps. And then the cello shows you the way. I don’t think I will ever reach 100%, but I’m trying to make it sound alive so you forget it’s coming from four strings. And that’s the ideal.

Nick Holmes Music: And again, looking back on that concert, I was struck by your playing style. Many players who perform the famous concertos seem to be battling with their instrument. Are you as calm as you look on stage? 

Jan Vogler: No, no, no, I’m not! I’m constantly trying to improve things. But what I do feel is that the orchestra is a mass of energy, lots of individuals who unite to give energy. And the soloist has to be a dialogue partner with the orchestra. So I have to be extremely strong, because the orchestra is the energy of 60 people or something like that, with very, very strong players, and I’m alone.

“If something goes wrong, I let it go and do not worry about it”

So I team up with my cello, try to be at one with it, and then talk to the orchestra. So that’s my idea. I’m not at ease, of course. I always have my own struggles like everyone else, but I do feel that if I can somehow create a connection with the cello at home, that is not a discussion at the concert.

Even if something goes wrong, I let it go and do not worry about it, and still keep talking to the orchestra, because the orchestra is my main partner, and the audience is kind of an observer, but once in a while, you can also turn to the audience and preach a little bit. The German way of making music is a little bit like a pastor in church. Sometimes it can be too much, but when we play Bach’s Cello Suites, we tell stories to the audience. 

So I feel that in the concerto, you have these few moments when you turn to the audience, but you also have a lot of moments when you try to converse with the orchestra and the conductor. And I felt with The Hallé, it was wonderful, because they were very lively, excellent musicians. And I also had a good connection with Kahchun [Wong]. And he told me afterwards he liked somehow the way I played the Shostakovich, and he said, “Does it have to do with your childhood in East Berlin?” I said, “Who knows, but possibly, you know.” I try not to copy my colleagues, even if I like a colleague very much. I try to find my own way to play. 

The Reopening of the Frauenkirche in Dresden

Dresdner Musikfestspiele and Jordi Savall in the Frauenkirche, Dresden. Photo: Oliver Killig

Nick Holmes Music: Yes, and talking about East Berlin, I think one of the highlights of your career to date has been performing at the reopening of the Frauenkirche in Dresden in 2005, after it had been destroyed in WWII. And as an East Berliner, as an East German, how did that feel? 

Jan Vogler: I was in the green room preparing a few minutes before, and I couldn’t feel anything. I was like, “Just remember the piece. Is everything okay?” I was very prepared, I must say, and I had created a good connection with Lorin Maazel during the rehearsals, thank God, because he was supposed to be a difficult man. He was very kind to me, almost fatherly. I had worked with the New York Philharmonic before. I recorded Dvořák’s Cello Concerto a year before with the New York Philharmonic and David Robertson. So I knew the orchestra a little bit, and Maazel had accepted me. That was a big compliment already.

So there I was in my green room, I thought, okay, this is one of those concerts. You just focus on this. My father was there. My father didn’t want to come initially. He didn’t come to many of my concerts. He was too scared. I had exceeded his expectations, I think. For him to sit in the audience, and I’d be on the stage, and anything could happen, I think it scared him very much.

But he did come to Dresden, and my mum was there. And then I came on stage and I focused and when the whole thing was done, I felt like, okay, I had I played my Schumann and the Colin Matthews, the way I could play it. And my father came, and he said, “Well done.” That was the biggest compliment he would ever give by far. But that he accepted my playing that night was already a lot.

“It was one of those moments when you can’t fold, you have to hold on”

And then I thought, the orchestra accepted [my playing], the conductor, my partners, the audience had lots of tears because the event itself, you know? But it was one of those moments when you can’t fold, you have to hold on, because your career will always have these moments, and often you play a piece that’s dear to you. If you’re lucky, you can play the Schumann or Shostakovich. Those are some of my favourite pieces. You can play something you can tell a story about, then people will trust you, maybe with more work.

It was almost like my audition in Dresden when I became principal cellist [at the Staatskapelle, at the age of 20]. Dresden. It was similar. I worked very hard. To my surprise, I got the job, and then I knew, okay, this is just the first step. Now you have to focus and learn all this music.

The Rebuilding of Dresden

The ruins of the Frauenkirche in Dresden in the early 1990s. Credit: Alison Howe

Nick Holmes Music:  How do you feel about the rebuilding of Dresden? Is that something that moves you? 

Jan Vogler: Yes, it does. I guess every generation feels that, but do we keep all the memories of history, have we learned the right lessons from history? I still remember my grandmother telling me how she took my father and his brother to the basement when there were fire alarms in Leipzig, and how she wrapped them in wet towels so they wouldn’t catch fire, if there was a fire. I grew up with the Cold War, and there was a constant fear that the whole situation would explode. And then 1989 came, and we were all like, “Oh my God, we have new hippies or something!”

The rebuilt Frauenkirche in Dresden, showing how existing stonework was incorporated in the new church

And then the Frauenkirche was rebuilt, and it became a symbol of the healing of the wounds of war and the whole of Dresden is a testimony to this incredible story of how humans can overcome great tragedies. So it does move me very much, and I get shivers when I talk about it, because I feel, aren’t those the great stories of humanity that we can overcome something? Those things, I think, are wonderful.

“We are all humans, and don’t we all want peace, harmony, and fun?“

If humans could sometimes forget the past and move on, and say, “let’s just do something positive,” remember the past as a learning experience, and go into the future with a fresh, open heart. And that’s what we all felt in the Frauenkirche, because we felt like we were enemies in the war, but aren’t we all humans, and don’t we all want peace, harmony, and fun? It was really, really very basic in a way. 

And I just played last week, excuse me for the digression, but it was really wonderful. I just played the Schumann Concerto in Seattle with Xian Zhang, who was Assistant Conductor to Maazel during the concert. She said, “Oh, you don’t have to play the Schumann for me because I remember it. I was sitting in every single rehearsal.” She also remembered that trip as one of the highlights of her life.

Nick Holmes Music: Thank you very much. It was a real pleasure speaking to you today.

Jan Vogler: Same here, same here!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

The Dresden Music Festival, ‘Lightness of Being’, runs from 14 May to 14 June 2026. For more information, click here

Read on – Jan Vogler with the Hallé…

The Hallé – Beethoven’s Eroica – Live Review
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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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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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Ms Amy Birks – Interview

The Cover of In Our Souls by Ms Amy Birks

Ms Amy Birks is an award-winning vocalist and songwriter, and also produces and arranges her own music. She previously sang with the acclaimed band Beatrix Players, and she released her first solo album All That I am & All That I Was in 2020. Now she returns with her new album In Our Souls. In an in-depth interview with Nick Holmes Music, she talks about how she writes and records her music and the inspiration for songs on her album, including the Brontë sisters and their home at the Parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire.

PART I Writing and Recording

I think I know who I am and what I want to do with my life and what my purpose is. So maybe that comes through.

Nick Holmes Music: To someone who doesn’t know your music, how would you describe the style?

Ms Amy Birks: I would say it was a mixture of classical meets songwriter and it has a kind of haunting and theatrical presence. And I definitely don’t get stuck in one genre. You know it’s whatever comes naturally, but definitely the theatrics, drama, songwriter, classical with a dash of rock in there.

Nick Holmes Music: There’s something quite theatrical about some of the spoken word introductions to some of the songs on the album.

Maybe it was lockdown that sent me very internal … It wasn’t a planned thing. I would just come up into my studio, really working and reworking the tracks and with Brothers and The Woman in White it just felt natural to add an extra layer of drama on there, so it was just me locked in a room with, ‘How can I really put myself into it?’ I remember from my last album with Jamaica Inn when I did the video, I really enjoyed a bit of acting for the video, so I think that’s in me and the performer in me came out.

Nick Holmes Music: How would you describe your voice? It’s quite distinctive, isn’t it? Have you had any formal training?

Ms Amy Birks: Oh no, I was only speaking to John Hackett [flautist on the album and younger brother of Steve Hackett] about that the other day and he said, ‘of course you’ve had training haven’t you’ and I said, ‘no, not one hour, one day, nothing.’ I’ve always sang since I can remember …  I was in the church choir, just up from the family house. As soon as I could sing in front of the school audience, I was up there and then I did Music Tech at university, so all the way through my life I’ve had opportunities to sing, but no formal training – piano, yes, but not vocals.

Nick Holmes Music: So it just came out naturally, that really rich sort of mezzo soprano?

Ms Amy Birks: Yeah, it’s maybe because of the people that I’ve listened to in the past. I would religiously listen to Eddi Reader of Fairground Attraction when I was in my younger teens, and I can hear sometimes in my pronunciation that you can tell certain artists that I’ve listened to. So it was like Eddi Reader, Alanis Morissette, and Tori Amos. Those sorts of guys. Never really Kate Bush to be honest, even though that tends to come up quite a bit, I was more into Joni Mitchell, Natalie Merchant and Suzanne Vega, very much. It’s that world and the storytelling.

Nick Holmes Music: How and when do you actually write?

Ms Amy Birks: This might sound odd, but I don’t plan it. I feel like something comes to me and I have to very quickly go up to my room or grab some paper and the song comes very quickly, or the idea. Sometimes the piano riff comes first, but I generally feel like someone’s going, ‘Hey, you’ve got to get this down now’, if that doesn’t sound weird. I never say, ‘Right, this weekend, on Saturday and Sunday, I’m going to go and sit and just wait and see what happens. It doesn’t work like that. I have to wait for it to come to me and then I disappear for a while.

Nick Holmes Music: And which comes first, the words or the music?

Ms Amy Birks: A lot of the time it’s all at the same time. So I can kind of hear a finished piece, but then have to decipher, break it down, ‘Okay, my lyrics are coming.’ I’m writing it down and the melody and the structures are all coming at the same time, unless I’m sat at my piano, I think, ‘Well, actually I like this piece, I’ve got a good idea coming here.’ And then I’ll write lyrics. But the main vocal melody and the lyric tends to come at the same time, and sometimes cello, piano, and bass and everything all at the same time.

Nick Holmes Music: Do you write at the piano, or does it come into your head?

Ms Amy Birks: It comes into my head and then I have to find it on the piano because I’m not a naturally gifted pianist. Not at all. I would find it very daunting playing in front of anybody.  I’m very different when it comes to my voice, I can sing in front of anybody but piano, totally opposite. I see it very much as a vehicle to get my ideas out, rather than me being a pianist. So, it comes into my head and then I have to work through and work out, ‘What is that, what note is that?’

Nick Holmes Music: Is it fair to say that in some ways In Our Souls is a less personal album than your first album All That I am and All That I was?

Ms Amy Birks: Yes. I think so, but there are a couple of songs that are deeply personal on this, Brothers being one of them, I needed to just get that off my chest and out there. The Woman in White is definitely about me and my past marriage. But the rest, I kind of just wanted to have more fun with the music. And I suppose I’m in a better place. So, not so many horrendously charged songs. Hopefully it feels a little bit more uplifting this time.

Nick Holmes Music: You recorded, produced and mixed the album. How did you find that? Did you find it difficult to be objective and step back from it all?

Ms Amy Birks: I suppose it was actually but, Tom Manning [guitarist] listened to the mixes towards the end and also my manager Ian Blackaby. So, I had those guys to just tell me, ‘Is this okay or tell me to stop now!’ But I felt like I was in a much better position to understand what I was doing this time compared to the last album. I spent hours and hours on really understanding sound and the soundscape and positioning. I try if I can to structure a lot of my music based on an orchestra. You know where they would sit naturally within the orchestra, which is I suppose natural for my music because it always seems to have cello or violin or viola in. And so that kind of creates my base. But I did find it easier this time. It was hard, the first album. I was really quite worried, I didn’t know whether it was going to be good enough, how people were going to react to it, but for this one I felt more confident and I’m proud of it, even before it went out the door so that was a good test for me, I think.

Nick Holmes Music: You did all the arrangements yourself? They feel quite a lot more complex than the previous album.

Ms Amy Birks: That’s probably just my brain becoming more complex, but arranging is one of my favourite things to do. I love layering and working out how to build the tracks. I spent a hell of a lot more time on arranging than I did actually writing the songs, that’s for sure. Definitely a favourite part of the whole process.

Nick Holmes Music: It feels that there’s a new kind of maturity and richness both about your singing and your song writing compared with the first album, which was excellent by the way …

Ms Amy Birks: Thank you!

Nick Holmes Music: What’s changed? How did that come about?

Ms Amy Birks:  I’m less stressed about everything, I think because I’ve just matured and realised what life is about a bit more. And I have a really solid partner in crime in my now husband, Simon, so I just have the headspace that I never had before. And now I think – I know this sounds a bit deep – but I think I know who I am and what I want to do with my life and what my purpose is. So maybe that comes through.

Nick Holmes Music: So does your husband contribute creatively?

Ms Amy Birks: No, he’s just got a really good way of looking at life. He’s a crazy passionate ultrarunner and he’s really wonderful to talk through ideas with. Actually he’s got a really good voice, and he introduced me to bands like Depeche Mode that I never really listened to before, so maybe that had some sort of influence …. there were some electronic sounds actually that came through, and that’s probably off the of the back of me listening to some of the Depeche Mode records, but no creative input. It’s just good to chat through ideas at the end of the day.

Nick Holmes Music: You did virtually all the backing vocals yourself; how important was it to you that that you had this multi layered approach to the backing vocals?

Ms Amy Birks: It’s something I do naturally. I love harmonising off the cuff. I would never write a melody down or really take that much time. I just press record and see what happens. So there’s a lot of that on my record where it’s just of the moment. I put down what comes into my head and see what happens. There’s quite a bit of that on the album and I just enjoy it. I enjoy the build-up of layers of vocals. Maybe it comes back to my roots singing in choirs, and growing up in a house where my dad could sing. My mum can, but she would never admit it. So there’s always voices around. But for me, I kind of challenge myself, ‘Let’s see how obscure I can make this next vocal line’, and then see if I can interweave it; I like clashes, but it’s still got to make sense when it’s there.

Nick Holmes Music: Steven Wilson has said that he was very strongly influenced by The Beach Boys in terms of layering vocals, and he does most of his backing vocals. Was there any particular band that influenced you?

Ms Amy Birks: I think if you listen to some of Eddi Reader’s records, I always loved her atmospheric sort of vocals, and it was always her. So I assume it’s probably come from that. I used to, from 13 or 14 years old, put her records on; this is how I taught myself that how to be able to harmonise with anything on the spot is to listen to records, like the stuff from Eddi Reader and just never hit her main note, and just train my brain to very quickly snap into what that chord could be. So I should imagine it’s from that.

Nick Holmes Music: And there’s a male voice that creeps in occasionally; is that your dad?

Ms Amy Birks: That’s my dad, yes. He got up on Saturday actually and sang at the album launch which was beautiful and I cried a little bit at the end. He sang Say Something [from the first album] with me, which is really poignant because the lyrics kind of point to my dad saying that to me, ‘Why didn’t you say something?’ So it was a real moment that we caught, but yeah I love his voice. Say Something was about two things that happened in my childhood. One, I was attacked by a boy in my music class when I was 14 and he got expelled; and the next was I used to do quite a bit of modelling and at the age of 17, I worked with a photographer, and he was horrendous to be around, and the sort of stuff that he was encouraging me to try and do was just… no one should be faced with that sort of behaviour at the age of 17. There was a lot of nude photography around me, and just things that happened and were said to me and done around me that I should never have experienced. But for some reason at the time, because he was kind of trying to be my manager, music wise, I didn’t say anything because I was scared of losing out on something. And I opened up to my parents later on and said, you know, he was a horrible man and the things that he said and did should never have been allowed to happen. I know it’s pretty hard and awful for my dad to hear, so then I wrote the chorus of Say Something from his perspective. So then to get up and sing together was emotional, to say the least.

Nick Holmes Music: Are you happy to talk about this?

Ms Amy Birks: I think you have to be open. If I’ve written a song about it then I’ve got to talk about it.

Nick Holmes Music: It’s in the public domain isn’t it?

Ms Amy Birks: Yes.

PART II Individual Songs on In our Souls

The less control you have I think from external sources the more creative you can be

Nick Holmes Music:  So let’s talk about individual tracks on the new album, starting with Brothers. It has really anguished opening spoken words, ‘Do you do you know why?’ And it’s about the relationship with your estranged brothers…

Ms Amy Birks: My twin and my younger brother. We’ve just had a very, very difficult relationship. I think maybe with my twin it probably started … I was never competitive with him, but I think it was the other way around. I even think it probably started when we were children in school. We were very good at sport so teachers would put us up against each other in things like swimming races, so that competition emerged. So maybe it started there. But really very sad, really, because you think twins are going to be close, but I’ve just had the most difficult relationship; it’s the most difficult one I’ve ever had in my life, and I’ve had a few difficult ones, and it’s upsetting. And really, I can’t put my finger on what it is, which is why I say, ‘do you know? Do you know why?’ Because I really don’t, and I don’t know why … There’s a lot of hatred between us and it is hate. I wouldn’t say it’s a dislike, and the same with my younger brother. We were very, very close until maybe six or seven years ago, something like that. And then relationships happen and people go off and meet partners and form their own opinion of life and how things should happen and – so yes, two very, very difficult relationships – heart breaking up to the point where a couple of years ago I thought it was going to break me … Probably why there was a lot coming through on my last album, I thought I was going to have a breakdown. It was that hard for me. But in the last three years I’ve realised that when things like this happen, you send them love and you send them on their way because certain people are not supposed to be in your life, whether they’re family or not. So if you can recognise that, you’re in a much better position then to enjoy your own life.

Nick Holmes Music: So do you feel to an extent that writing tracks like this and some of the more personal tracks on your previous album is almost a form of therapy for you?

Ms Amy Birks: Massively, yes! It’s cheaper too! Yes it’s a way of just almost putting something to bed, too. It’s like, ‘Yes, okay that’s out of my system now.’ I hope even with Brothers … it could come across as harsh, yes, because it’s been a hard relationship. However, there’s a lot of sadness in there too, so I try with all my lyrics not to … you know they can be quite close to the bone, but hopefully never go over that line because a lot of my songs are actually written about people, actual people. So I have to be careful.

Nick Holmes Music: And talking of that, who is Elsa? Is that a real person?

Ms Amy Birks: No, no. So I wrote that song when I was about 19, so I’ve got a couple of songs on this album that are really quite old now, well sort of old! It’s fictitious, just a lady that was very aware of her needs. I was 19 or 20 when I wrote that. Maybe it was a little of me in there. I don’t know. But some songs are very deeply personal; others, I suppose like The Beatles did, right – they just made things up and they just turned them into songs. So no, I don’t know an Elsa – I never met an Elsa!

Nick Holmes Music: There are three songs on the album which use words by the Brontës; why did you choose to go for their poetry rather than their perhaps more famous novels?

Ms Amy Birks: I suppose because the natural one was Wuthering Heights being, you know, Kate Bush, she’s kind of conquered that one. So don’t go near that. Actually Jane Eyre is my favourite, but I think when I read their poetry, I just thought, well, this fits so easily into pieces of music because there’s so much structure there already. There’s so much rhythm and I just remember seeing Evening Solace, which is In Our Souls and straight away I was getting a melody to it. So it’s a natural thing that I never really thought to tackle a Jane Eyre. I don’t know, it’s a natural thing to go towards. Maybe I was being lazy! It’s much easier to say the poems than to come to try and capture such incredible stories, but who knows, I might just do that next. I almost think it could be a concept album, you know the bigger pieces.

Nick Holmes Music: Let’s just talk through the individual songs, starting with In Our Souls by Charlotte Brontë.

Ms Amy Birks: So with this there was a lot of the just singular lines that resonated with me, and to me it just sounded like the sunshine, something like a real spring morning. I do a lot of gardening, I’m in an allotment a lot, and I tried to capture something that sounded like a celebration of something beautiful, something full of life. So when that piano part came to me, the big piano riff, it was like, ‘Yes! This has to be for that track.’ So that came separately, the piece of piano, but knowing that I was already looking at poems from the Brontës. So I think it’s more about bringing out the words and trying to bring out some of the character as well of each of the Brontë sisters. And so hopefully In Our Souls does sound like a kind of celebration and something that feels really fresh, uplifting and very English.

Nick Holmes Music: Then the next one is A Death Scene, which is Emily Brontë?

Ms Amy Birks: With what Emily’s written in terms of …  well, the only novel … but her poetry was dark. And from what I’ve read she seemed a feisty character, so I wanted that to come through, I think, in A Death Scene. I love the instrumentation on A Death Scene. Some of that track is definitely up there with my favourite parts of the album, normally when I’m not singing to be honest – I can sit back and listen to John Hackett, with the flute and Tom Manning with the guitar. I didn’t actually write that guitar part. I said to Tom, ‘Make people weak with this section.’ And then he sent that through, ‘Wow! That really is beautiful. You’ve hit the brief.’ And so where I could I have just said to the musicians on the album, ‘Really listen’. This is telling them what it is, what the song’s about, and then they’ve had freedom to express themselves. I think Tom Manning especially really comes through strong on this album. I can hear Tom in the music, which is great.

Nick Holmes Music: And finally, there’s The Dream, with words by Anne Brontë?

I wanted this to sound intimate and personal, just like your dreams. Through reading about the sisters I saw that Anne preferred vocal music, so this has more of a traditional singer-songwriter feel to it than the other two Brontë poems on the album. But it’s not without its drama, where she awakes in the middle eight,

But then to wake and find it flown, The dream of happiness destroyed.

Anne Brontë

Nick Holmes Music: And for the Brontës you actually went to Haworth to do some research. How did those visits go what? What did you find out that inspired you?

Ms Amy Birks: To be honest, I’ve been going to Haworth since I was a young girl. My mum and dad took me there when I was probably seven or eight years old. I’ve always been drawn to it and there’s such a darkness around their house – the sound of black crows all around sends shiver down my spine. But I always love to just go and be still. I’m very much into the energies of the place and the House [the Brontë Parsonage Museum] and I think you can absorb so much from just being in a place where they would write and create and go through turmoil and have happy memories. So I visited there, and I did my research to try and work out what sort of music and what sort of classical music they were all like listening to, like Liszt for example. But for me it’s about feeling the energies in that house, and I think it’s full of them. I’ve been there probably six or seven times and will keep going back. And it’s amazing that you know if you’ve seen some of the clothes they wore and how tiny they were, and Charlotte was absolutely minute. It’s fascinating to see some of their miniatures. I resonate a lot with them in lots of different ways. I have a doll’s house which is filled with antique miniatures and so there are lots of different reasons why I’m drawn to the Brontës.

Nick Holmes Music: And so striking that they lived in a small village, in a parsonage, and yet their imaginations were so vivid.

Ms Amy Birks: Yeah, absolutely wild. But then again, you go to the back of the House, and you step foot into the Moors. And it’s barren up there and you can imagine what … you have to dig deep and find happiness in a different way.  I don’t really watch the TV so I tend to go inwards and do a lot, and the less control you have I think from external sources the more creative you can be. So I get it – once you’re there, I think you can understand where they did get those ideas from and the fact that there were three of them bouncing ideas and encouraging I think that’s incredible.  

Nick Holmes Music: Is there a link between your musical influences and Iamthemorning, and the solo work of their vocalist Marjana Semkina?

Ms Amy Birks: I’m aware of their work, yeah. I’m not sure if I’m aware of the sort of music that they would listen to you, but I know of those guys yeah and I’ve got their albums.

Nick Holmes Music: I was more thinking in terms of the fact that they have quite a Victorian sensibility. And I wonder if that that relates to what we’ve been talking about in terms of the Brontës and looking back in time to that era.

Ms Amy Birks: There’s a romance there, isn’t there, looking back through history. Maybe it’s because of the simpleness of it – complicated for other reasons, and hardships. But we lose ourselves in silly things these days and I think they didn’t, so everything was said because it needed to be said. I think we’re too soft these days and we would get distracted and controlled too easily. So I think if there is a romance, I’ve always been drawn to that era. I’ve collected Victorian clothes since I was at university, where I’d go to Manchester, to Affleck’s palace. The Victorian cape I have on the front cover of In Our Souls, that was something I bought when I about 18. So I always had a fascination with that era.

Nick Holmes Music: Mariana on her Twitter feed describes herself as a ‘dead Victorian girl.’

Ms Amy Birks: Yeah, and her artwork’s beautiful and the whole vibe is wonderful.

Nick Holmes Music: The Woman in White – is there a literary connection? Or did you just take the title from the Wilkie Collins novel?

Ms Amy Birks: I think I read it around the time of actually writing Woman in White but that’s literally where the connection stops, because The Woman in White was definitely about me and my kind of split life of, ‘Who the hell is that woman over there. Oh, that’s me!’ So it’s that, but I do remember reading The Woman in White at that same moment. Actually I found that hard work. I found that book really hard work. It just jumps around so much, but I got to the end of it!

Nick Holmes Music: So just looking now at Hold On, which is another real highlight of the album…

Ms Amy Birks: Thank you.

Nick Holmes Music: … It shows a kind of new sophistication in writing and arranging – the way it starts with a gentle piano and a very sweet violin, and then rises to this huge epic guitar climax. Is that something you’re aiming at now, that kind of development within a song?

Ms Amy Birks: Yeah, more dynamics, so you really feel the quiet moments because again, that middle eight and the way that it drops, and you’ve got the guitar that’s really present, but it’s a quiet presence. Playing with those dynamics, is absolutely what I’ll do in the future. I want to really go for that. I wrote that song when I was sat by the lake in Coniston. And my husband was in the fells doing one of his runs, so it’s written about him. So this song is for Simon. So it was quite a personal song. He had … not the easiest start in life, but he’s found and channels a lot of his energy into running and he was up there in the fells when I wrote this. Again, a song that came very quickly and written on the back of a bookmark. I think I will play more and more with dynamics because I think you feel the words, you feel the presence in the song much more.

Nick Holmes Music: And why did you choose to end the album, to bookend it with an instrumental version of the title track?

Ms Amy Birks: I think it’s me growing as an artist in terms of confidence to be able to not sing on a track and believe that the music that I write is as strong as the lyric. And I love that piece of music without me on it, so I thought it would be a nice way of ending the album with the bookend.

PART III Musical Collaborations

There’s been a lot of natural input from the musicians on this album, and maybe that’s because there’s flexibility there, but I’m like, ‘Come on, inject your personality in there’, and they have.

Nick Holmes Music: Tell me a little bit about the collaborators you worked with on In Our Souls

Ms Amy Birks: John Hackett [flute] of course, he was on the last record. Everything I send to him, the stuff that you get back, I just think he’s a beautiful player. He’s very much melody and song first and he wants to complement and doesn’t want to get in the way. He’s very much that and I’m like, ‘Please get in the way sometimes, John, it’s fine.’ I could listen to him all day. But it’s an absolute pleasure to work with someone like John, he’s great and I spent a bit of time with him with the gigs just lately. So finally after all the lockdown, it’s nice to get to know these people, but you kind of get a sense of who they are through working together with the music.

Tom Manning [guitar] I met when I was 19. I think Tom was just 18. We both did music tech together at Staffordshire University. We formed the Beatrix Players together with Helena Dove. I’ve always loved Tom’s writing and playing, and Tom and I wrote Goodnight for Now when we were 19 or 20. So there are a couple of songs on that album that were right back from our university days.

Then there’s Kyle Welch, bass player. I think Kyle is 19 or 20. He’s so young and an absolutely beautiful energy, full of beans, and an incredible player. He’s so melodic and I love that fretless sound. He was recommended to me through another bass player that was my first ever bass player in my first band when I was about 16 or 17 and I said, ‘Hey, I really want a fretless bass on this record.’ He’s still playing, and he said, ‘I’m nowhere near as good as this guy.’ He’s young, keen, but my God is he good and I just think he is wonderful.

And then Andrew Booker, the drummer and percussionist. I met him when I supported Tim Bowness a couple of years ago in Camden. And I remember thinking then because I got up on stage with him, ‘Wow, this guy can really make me move’ and I’ve spent quite a few holidays and trips to South America, so I really love that sort of vibe and Andrew just gets it. He gets my direction and I love what he does. He’s so creative and absolutely magnetic to watch on stage, he really is. He’s a beautifully creative player.

Cellist Clare O’Connell, she’s lovely. I love to write for strings, so a lot of it is just sending scores, tweaking them and the guys record what I’ve played and written. She’s a beautifully sensitive player, very different to Caroline Lavelle [who played on the first album] who was really rock and roll in her playing. which I absolutely loved too!

And then, Frank van Essen, violin. Wow, he’s a powerhouse. So I sent ideas for Hold On. He messaged me saying, ‘ I’ve just put an idea down for Hold On, have a listen and see what you think.’ I cried when I heard it because I thought, ‘Wow, you’ve just taken this to another level’, so there’s been a lot of natural input from the musicians on this album, and maybe that’s because there’s flexibility there, but I’m like, ‘Come on, inject your personality in there’, and they have. There’s a lot of collaboration on this record.

Ms Amy Birks onstage with guitarist Tom Manning

I’ve basically written all the piano parts and then sent the majority to Moray Macdonald to rerecord properly. Because, like I say, I can play the piano, but I don’t wish to say that I’m a pianist. But I do love to write piano. And Nicole Reynolds, who has quite different style actually, she played on Hold On and In our Souls. But she’s a busy lady and also for the for the live tracks now I’ve decided to move away from the piano, because I really enjoy what the guitar brings to the sound, so all of the live gigs we’ll be doing are two guitars instead of piano. And so all the live stuff I’ve rewritten, rearranged, added, taken away things. So basically I had to rewrite the album again, so that’s tested me. But yes, a big group of wonderful musicians on this record here.

In Our Souls is out now.