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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
