Author: fgt

Singer-songwriter, drummer and Gizmo co-inventor Kevin Godley met his soon-to-be creative partner Lol Creme at art school in the 60s. They played in numerous bands together, including Hotlegs, which eventually became 10cc. They left in 1977, became Godley & Creme, and were soon elevated from pop stars to in-demand pop video directors.

Godley tells Prog about the, ahem, consequences of the duo’s creative career, the recently released 11-CD set Parts Of The Process – The Complete Godley & Creme, and that time he was mistaken for Paper Lace’s drummer.

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Art-school alumni, one-time prog pop star, songwriter, video and filmmaker, environmentalist: Kevin Godley has, for decades, confounded expectations in pursuit of what might be called his vision – though he’d probably baulk at the idea of being a visionary. At 79, he shows no signs of slowing down; he’s just completed work on an orchestral piece with American classical composer John Califra entitled America WTF? “It’s about the current political situation and divide in America,” he says. “It’s very dark.”

He’s also busy working on a musical, trying to finance two screenplays (both of which he had a hand in), and joining a video games company. “I’m not one of those people that will retire to the country and paint. I’m not that guy.”

We’re here to talk about the expansive new box set navigating Godley’s musical collaboration with former longtime writing partner Lol Creme. Parts Of The Process charts their musical arc post-10cc from the great triple disc/musical folly (argue among yourselves) Consequences – a concept piece that’s as much about divorce as it is meteorological disaster – to their final glimmering pop farewell, 1988’s Goodbye Blue Sky. However, our conversation touches on everything from his former band and writing with comedy giant Peter Cook to helping to pioneer the music video revolution and almost working with Bob Dylan.

Consequences reminds us of Zappa’s Jazz From Hell album. He was in thrall to making music with the Synclavier, while on Consequences you and Lol were intent on using the Gizmotron (Gizmo) device you invented. Would that be close to the truth?

Yes, we didn’t really get to use it very often in the context of the band. It just didn’t sit for whatever reason. We’d used it on one or two tracks. We kind of created this thing, conceived this thing and we thought, “Shit, what are we going to do with it?” I mean, we didn’t even know what it was capable of.

Not many musicians invent a piece of machinery in their downtime, let alone a Gizmo.

It was an actual piece of machinery, true. We’d always wanted to work with an orchestra in some capacity. But to actually do that you have to jump through a bunch of hoops, and they’re not cheap and they break for tea – stuff like that. There were Mellotrons around but we didn’t love them, and they kept breaking down.

On a good day the Gizmo sounded like an orchestra, and on a bad day it sounded like a chainsaw

We were looking at the guitar thinking, “This is a stringed instrument; why can it not be bowed in some way?” So, we sort of gaffer-taped Lol’s Stratocaster to the wall and. put an eraser on the end of an electric drill and held it against the guitar strings. A bit of a Leatherface vibe to it: it nearly sawed the thing in half! But for about four seconds there was a sound that was vaguely reminiscent of a violin. And we thought, “Ooh!”

So you made and marketed them.

Yep – John McConnell from the Manchester College of Science and Technology helped us develop the prototype. It was this bunch of wheels, sort of Da Vinci-ish, though not quite up there with the helicopter. It was John’s prototype that we made Consequences with. Then they were mass produced in the US by a company called Musitronics – but the timing was atrocious. It was the beginning of cheap synths, and it was very vulnerable to weather change and stuff like that. On a good day it sounded like an orchestra, and on a bad day it sounded like a chainsaw.

In 1976 – post How Dare You! – you and Lol took the Gizmo into 10cc’s Strawberry Studios to start work on Consequences. Were you still in 10cc at this point?

Yeah; it was the end of the album cycle and tour, but we were still in the band. We had some downtime – three weeks in Strawberry, as I recall – and the potential of working the Gizmo got us excited again.

Weren’t you excited by 10cc any more?

The problem with being in any band is everything becomes rote after a while. You lose the spark; it’s like, ‘Oh God, there’s another tour coming, there’s another album coming. We’ve got to write another bunch of songs.’ We were looking for something fresh. Our attention span was very short.

You were smoking your own body weight in dope and recording through the night. What was your mindset like at the time?

The label thought, ’We better get a responsible adult in to tame them.’ And the responsible adult was Peter Cook!

I suppose it was like – not a vanity project exactly, but something to test the capabilities of what we’d done. But there was no master plan. The first week or so was, “Let’s plug it in and see what comes out,” because we’d never really used it other than on Old Wild Men [from Sheet Music]. At one point, we created a tape loop – Phil Manzanera’s idea, as I recall. We put a bump in the tape and it sounded like a soprano opera singer. That was a revelation. But mainly, it was fun again. Then, as you know, it turned into a monster.

When did you both decide that you’d had enough of 10cc?

It wasn’t really one moment. There were a few meetings had because the label had been in touch. “It’s time for you to make a new album, boys.” Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman had started writing songs for it. And we just didn’t have a taste for it. We were too into this.

They played us something – it might have been The Things We Do For Love – and we just thought it was beige. We’d had this pre-production meeting about the next album, and it went something like, “We need one of your long, weird ones, a slushy one, and we need some humour.” I was, like, “Hang on a minute – we don’t work to order.”

Prior to that, it was all about spending a certain amount of time in the studio and doing what we were capable of doing. We’d been relatively successful by going in the opposite direction. That’s what I enjoyed more than anything else. It was becoming a day job: we were taking care of business, but we didn’t take care of each other. We might have gone away and decided to come back if we’d had the time to stretch out and do what we wanted for a while, but that wasn’t allowed to happen. Four blokes. Four albums. Four years. That was it.”

Going back to Consequences, you and Lol decamped to the residential Manor Studios for three months, with Peter Cook in tow to continue with the recording sessions. Of all the people…

I don’t think he was there for the full three, but we had a lot of fun. I have this suspicion that by then the record label was thinking, “What the hell are these two idiots up to? We’ve agreed to release a record, but they’re spending more than the value of our country on this project. So, we better get a responsible adult in to tame them.” And the responsible adult they chose was Peter Cook!

They didn’t know there was a live mic open. We heard: ’What the fuck was that?’ ’No fucking clue. Are we going to sell that?’

It was a fascinating time. There were maybe two or three hours in the day where we were in sync. We worked at night and Peter, obviously, worked in the day. His concept was the divorced couple in the story; we’d provide the music and react to what the other was doing, but we’d rise at lunchtime, and we’d have a few hours together before Peter would start drinking. We were enjoying every second – that’s not to say we had a clue about what we were doing.

And there was no outside influence or producer to help guide you, tap on the studio glass and ask what the hell you were doing?

We were those producers! I remember there was an instance very early on when we were still at Strawberry. The managers of 10cc at the time came to hear what we were up to, so we played them the first 15 minutes that we had. We left them to it and they were saying all the right things – “Wow, extraordinary, amazing!”

We went out to have a cigarette, and they carried on talking in the studio, but what they didn’t know was that there was a live mic open. And we heard: “What the fuck was that?” “No fucking clue. Are we going to sell that?” The complete opposite reaction – but very managerial!

Among the dialogue and storytelling tangents, there are songs like Five O’ Clock In The Morning, which would have fitted perfectly on any of the first four 10cc records.

It was part of who we were; it’s in our DNA, so when we decided to write some actual songs, it sounded like us.

That album and a lot of your 10cc work is very visual. Is that a part of how you’re built too?

I think everything we ever wrote was visual. The only tools we had were audio tools; we didn’t mix with film people. We didn’t have a way into film, but we were art school trained. So there was always something bubbling underneath, but we did it in sound. I think we even called Consequences an “ear movie” at the time.

We’d become audio hermits. We weren’t aware of what was stirring: punk rock, the Sex Pistols, the polar opposite of what we were doing

I remember going outside to record windscreen wipers on the car in the rain – I forget for which song, but we were dedicated to getting it right. I’m in my car and the windscreen wipers were going, and it’s pissing rain and we had this mic outside. And there’s the guy on the pavement just looking at me, and it’s night time, and eventually he plucks up the courage and taps on my window. I wind it down and he leans in and goes: “Excuse me, are you the drummer from Paper Lace?” We got that on tape!

Lol says you were personally heartbroken when the album died a commercial death. Is heartbroken too big a word?

No – I was, because something happened to me maybe about three-quarters of the way through making it. I was very aware that we’d become audio hermits. We weren’t remotely aware of the outside world, what was stirring: punk rock, the Sex Pistols, the exact polar opposite of what we were doing. And when things like that happen, you must be aware of them. You can’t just keep going blindly and deathly forward, because it doesn’t really make sense.

I learned a lesson from that, but we were too far into it to start from scratch – forget about it. Then we heard they were going to release it as a three-album box set, selling for the extortionate amount of £12 quid in 1977 [approximately £70 today]. It was so ill-conceived; it did us a huge amount of damage. It fucked us up. We both put a huge amount of work into it, and no one liked it. No one understood it , and that ain’t going to help a career. It got slated in the press. We were the audio version of the movie Heaven’s Gate.

Did it really cost a million pounds in today’s money?

I don’t know how much it cost. It couldn’t have been cheap. Everyone was in and there was no way out. Peter Cook – even just that cost them a pretty penny. That’s for damn sure.

Remarkably, a mere two years later, the label fronted you cash again for something that couldn’t be quantified at the time: a music video.

I know; we weren’t a touring band. We had a single coming out, we were always a bit of an anomaly for the label. They didn’t quite know what to do with us, particularly after Consequences. The album was Freeze Frame and the lead single was Englishman In New York, and we thought the only way to get seen or heard was to do a short film or something. So we came up with a storyboard and the label loved it. We didn’t know there was going to be such a thing as the video industry or indeed videos. Nobody did then.

They got us a director called Derek Burbidge [The Police, AC/DC] and his job was to make our vision, such as it was, come to life – which he did, admirably, and during that one day of shooting and the subsequent day of editing, a huge light bulb switched on above our heads. We thought, “Fuck, this is brilliant – we could do this!” I even liked being out front in my red shirt and my swish suit, Mr Cool. When I looked at myself I thought, “Fuck off!” but at least I was trying.

Then in 1980, Steve Strange and Visage approached you about making something for them for their Fade To Grey single.

Yeah, our albums were slowly ticking over, but we still weren’t touring; we weren’t doing anything. They wanted a video because they couldn’t get on Top Of The Pops or Whistle Test, so they made a film as a stopgap. People would play the film and liked what they were seeing, but there was no infrastructure in place; no video commissioners.

It was all word-of-mouth, musician to musician – a trust thing. So we were lucky. We were at the beginning of something; we’d never been in that place before. We filmed it, helped do the edit, learning all the time. Then we began to be the go-to people for a while. We had this reputation. And we got to do some really interesting things.

You must have had so much creative energy at that point. You did more than 50 music videos in the 80s for The Police, Duran Duran, George Harrison Lou Reed and others, and yet you were still making music.

Orson Welles was asked about how he’d made Citizen Kane. He said one of the most important ingredients was ignorance

I remember us putting out Under Your Thumb [from 1981’s Ismism], and we didn’t have any hope for it at all as a single. And we were shooting a video for Toyah Willcox [Thunder In The Mountains] on an airfield somewhere. A production guy came running up and said the single had just gone in the top 50. I was like, “Hang on a minute – how do we deploy the two things that we do?” But it was the same stuff. It just came out of two different taps. We turn this one on when we’re doing film. We turn this one on when we’re doing audio. It was just a natural thing, and those two things had somehow matured together.

You ended your creative partnership with Lol after arguably one of the best albums of your career, 1988’s Goodbye Blue Sky – which earned you an unlikely fan.

Dave Stewart got my wife and I in to see Bob Dylan at Hammersmith Apollo and we got to stand backstage and watch him. At the end of part one, after wowing everyone with Maggie’s Farm or something, he walked straight up to me and said, “You still making videos? Want to make one for me?” And then walked off. We met him at a hotel a few days later and he said, “You did a video where people were going through each other. Coming forward and going back,” and I couldn’t remember what he was talking about. It was A Little Piece of Heaven, which must have been on MTV all of two times – and he’d seen it! We never got to work together, but what a moment.

Did Cry – the haunting video and the equally haunting song – feel like the culmination of both of your creative taps?

Yes. People still want to talk about that video to me; it was a real moment in time. Elbow got me to recreate it for their Gentle Storm single – you know the crossfading faces? That was plan B; that was never meant to be the video. We wanted Torvill and Dean to skate to it, but they couldn’t do it when we needed them. We had to come up with something else sharpish, and that was what we came up with. Even after we’d shot it, we weren’t sure what we were going to do with it until we got into the edit suite. Then we started dissolving between faces and that’s when the penny dropped, and it got really interesting.

What’s the best 10cc album, and why is it Sheet Music?

Because we were a little bit more knowledgeable. It’s 1974; it’s our second album, so we’re a little bit more sophisticated – but we didn’t know it all then. Which from that point on we kind of did. We kind of knew who our audience was and what they might want.

Something that Orson Welles once said when he was asked about how he’d made Citizen Kane. He said one of the most important ingredients was ignorance: “I didn’t know how to do things, so I figured that anything I thought of would be possible.” Which he made happen. Not only by doing things like that, but thinking like that. That’s how you move a medium and the technology that drives it forward. If it’s too easy and too obvious, what’s the point?

Queens of the Stone Age have shared a trailer for Alive in the Catacombs, a film documenting their performance in the world-famous Catacombs of Paris, the final resting place for millions of French citizens, interred in the 1700s.

The Los Angeles band’s performance in the eerie tunnels beneath the French capital represented the fulfilment of a long-held dream for QOTSA frontman Josh Homme, who first visited the extraordinary location almost 20 years ago. No band had ever before been granted permission to play in the Catacombs, which made the group’s stripped-back set, augmented by a three-piece string section, genuinely historic.

A press statement for the film, which will be available to view from June 5, reads: “Every aesthetic decision, every choice of song, every configuration of instruments… absolutely everything was planned and played with deference to the Catacombs- from the acoustics and ambient sounds – dripping water, echoes and natural resonance – to the darkly atmospheric lighting tones that enhance the music. Far from the sound-insulated confines of the studio or the comfort of onstage monitors, Alive in the Catacombs sees the band not only rise to this challenge, but embrace it.”

Josh Homme says, “We’re so stripped down because that place is so stripped down, which makes the music so stripped down, which makes the words so stripped down… It would be ridiculous to try to rock there. All those decisions were made by that space. That space dictates everything, it’s in charge. You do what you’re told when you’re in there.”

He adds, “If you’re ever going to be haunted, surrounded by several million dead people is the place. I’ve never felt so welcome in my life.”

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Queens of the Stone Age will play their first shows since summer 2024 next month.

Their US mini-tour kicks off with a pair of shows at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston, on June 10 and 11. The band will travel to Europe to play shows in July and August, including an August 20 Dublin gig at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, and a headline performance at the Rock N Roll Circus at Sheffield’s Don Valley Bowl on August 27.

Cancelling shows last summer, the band released a statement saying, “QOTSA regret to announce the cancellation and/or postponement of all remaining 2024 shows. Josh has been given no choice but to prioritize his health and to receive essential medical care throughout the remainder of the year. Josh and the QOTSA family are so thankful for your support and the time we were able to spend together over the last year. Hope to see you all again in 2025.”

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

The Murder Capital played a free acoustic gig in Cologne last night, May 11, after their scheduled gig at the city’s Gebäude 9 venue was cancelled due to the club refusing to let the Dublin band perform with a Palestinian flag onstage.

The Irish band also had their gig at Berlin’s Club Gretchen cancelled on Saturday, May 11, for the same reason.

“We’ve tried everything we can to find another venue for tonight’s show, but it’s been impossible. So we’ll be putting on an acoustic show outdoors in a park somewhere this evening.”

“Us having a flag on our stage at a rock show is not a political statement, it is a human reaction to a horrific and unimaginable situation.”

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Last year, the band donated all profits from their vinyl single Love Of Country to Medical Aid for Palestine.

In a statement at the time, McGovern said: “We are releasing a 7” record of Love Of Country, with 100 per cent of the proceeds going to Medical Aid for Palestine. In the face of, and beyond such clear acts of evil, it is more vital than ever to cherish the richness of our diverse communities and the power of human connection. We must stand firm against the rise of nationalist ideologies and speak up for those whose worlds are being torn apart by hatred and violence.”

Watch the band play Love of Country and Swallow in Cologne below:

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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

At two hours and 34 tracks, prog metal icons Dream Theater’s 2016 album The Astonishing was ambitious even by their standards. Metal Hammer sat down with the band as the album was released to talk concepts, sci-fi and going full nerd.

Preposterous. There is no other word for it. Even within heavy metal, where bombast, self-indulgence and voyages through the surreal and hyperreal are cherished tenets, the new Dream Theater album stands out like a kaleidoscopic monolith floating majestically in an ocean of grey slurry. More than two hours long, and underpinned by an elaborate story set 300 years into some monstrous dystopian future, The Astonishing fully lives up to its name. In fact, Dream Theater may have lost their minds completely…

“Ha ha! Yeah, like, ‘What the hell is wrong with you guys?’” grins guitarist John Petrucci, mastermind of The Astonishing’s concept and narrative, as he reclines on a sofa at their label’s London office, along with keyboard maestro Jordan Rudess and vocalist James LaBrie. “We often ask ourselves that question! As far as timing goes, it definitely felt right for all of us to do a concept album again. The last one we did was [1999’s] Scenes From A Memory. In order to do it right, we really wanted to do it to the fullest extent – have a full story, developed characters and not only write an album, but write a show that we can present. And it didn’t start small [and grow], it started off with the full, grand idea! Ha ha ha! That’s just the way we work. Nothing was haphazard at all. It was very thought-out and very detailed.”

“We’re still a rock band, though!” Jordan interjects with a wry smile. “It’s a little uncommon for every detail to be thought out in a rock band, but still…”

“But we’re nerds at heart, right?” notes John, and all three explode into laughter.

Dream Theater, rounded out by bassist John Myung and drummer Mike Mangini, are fully aware of how they are perceived. Throughout the last 30 years, they’ve managed to become one of metal’s biggest and most consistently successful bands, despite being, by all mainstream standards, desperately uncool.

This time round, however, the gloves are definitely off. The Astonishing is not just an album: it’s a fully immersive story with its own screenplay, artwork and trading cards. It appears custom-built for future movie or stage show adaptations, not to mention the videogame market and, for maximum nerd points, the fantasy RPG world. It’s as if John Petrucci and his comrades are saying, “So, you thought we were massive nerds? Well check this shit out!”

“Ha ha ha! Yeah, that’s true, I guess. If you thought we were nerdy before, this will blow your mind!” laughs John. “As far as the RPG stuff goes, that would be the least of the influence. It’s not something that I’m personally into, but I think it crosses over in the sense that we’re all into sci-fi and fantasy; we all love Star Wars, Game Of Thrones, Lord Of The Rings, any futuristic stories about the Apocalypse…”

“And even Harry Potter!” grins Jordan.

“Ha ha ha! Yeah, Harry Potter, too. We love all that. So if anything, this grandiose way of looking at things comes more from movies. Whether it’s progressive music as a genre, gaming, sci-fi as a genre… it’s a very similar headspace for all of those. It’s for people that love storytelling and diving into the detail, the methodology of it all.”

“The whole prog movement is about fairies and elves and we’re proud of that!” Jordan cheerily proclaims, before adding, deadpan, “but there are no fairies and elves on this album.”

Instead, The Astonishing takes place in a world where societies have collapsed and been replaced by a feudal system: empires ruled by all-powerful leaders, with ordinary people reduced to cowed worker bees, striving for survival. Like many a sci-fi scenario, the album transports us to a dark and menacing time that is just plausible enough to ring true on some deep level. It certainly helps that some of the story’s principle supporting facts parallel what’s going on around us in 2016.

“The world [of The Astonishing] has returned to feudalism, the way it was when the aristocracy had all the money and the land and the power and ordinary people were just toiling,” John explains. “So that’s a little bit of a comment on what’s happening today and where things could potentially go. The other aspect is that in a lot of industries, robots are taking over and replacing humans, and so what would happen if that happened to the arts? In this future, with all this technology, in an effort to make perfect music, we make artificially intelligent machines – the NOMACs – that make music, and there’s no need for humans to make music anymore. So it’s about the juxtaposition of hearing these NOMACS making this really crappy nonsense music, because that’s what they think is good, and then hearing Dream Theater playing, with real strings, a real guitars, a real piano and a real singer…”

One of the more heartening phenomena of recent times has been the quiet but steady backlash against the disposability of much modern music and entertainment. A resurgence of interest in vinyl, box sets and immersive TV series that are consumed in huge, absorbing chunks, suggests that many people are rediscovering the joy of engaging with music and art, rather than merely using it as bland wallpaper to accompany other activities.

“It takes a certain mentality to listen to music,” Jordan states. “You’ve got to have patience or maybe just meditate. Everybody is more and more distracted, everyone’s multitasking… if you’re not looking at a screen, you’re being pulled away from it. It’s harder and harder to focus.”

“Music has definitely become a background for a lot of people,” nods James. “It’s not necessarily something people are listening to, and it could easily be a NOMAC in the background just making sounds while they’re texting their friends. Everyone is so inundated with so much media these days. There are too many distractions, whereas when we were all growing up, it was something to look forward to – you’d go and get that album and you’d sit with it the whole weekend and you’d keep spinning it, because you didn’t have all those distractions. This album is very relevant to that and what we’re seeing happening right now. It could easily go that way, right?”

“One of the things that we find more and more is that yes, there is a pop culture and yes, there is pop music, but there is a huge community of likeminded people who love to dive into things and want more substance,” adds John. “The people who love Star Wars and the mythology, that’s a huge community. It’s a matter of tapping into that and trying to do something that brings all those elements together. Ourselves as music fans, we’re like that. Dream Theater fans in general are like that. But to combine it, most musicians I talk to, you mention Game Of Thrones and they’re like, ‘Oh my god!’ but it’s the same headspace, you know? And so we’re trying to bring it all together.”

The great irony of Dream Theater’s approach to making music has never been more obvious. As The Astonishing combines elements that Game Of Thrones, Star Wars, Lord Of The Rings and even World Of Warcraft people will recognise, it should exert an allure beyond anything the band have achieved. But prog metal of this particular hue is routinely sneered at by some music fans, as if one kind of flat-out nerdiness is acceptable, but another is beyond the pale. Luckily, Dream Theater don’t particularly care and, more importantly, they are in this for the long haul.

The release of The Astonishing is just the beginning: as people start to explore the band’s newly minted future world and dive into the vivid intricacies of music and narrative, the first of a series of intimate live shows, where the album will be performed in its mind-bending entirety, will be taking place in London on February 18. It will be augmented with a full movie presentation; a grand, extra layer of experiential substance.

“We have a lot of special things planned, if they all happen!” John beams. “Besides our lighting engineer and set designer, we have another group of people in Montreal who specialise in this kind of immersive stage experience, a transformative experience using video, so it’ll be a combination of a physical set and video panels. It will almost be like a full movie that we’ll play along with. So you get your popcorn and you find your seat, and then you’re listening to us play and watching this visual experience at the same time. It should be fun! We have high expectations, so I hope we pull it off, ha ha ha!”

“People have become disconnected,” notes James. “I guess we need to help to re-educate people – that it’s OK to sit down with one thing and immerse yourself in it. It’s one of the great joys in life.”

Inspired by an honest love for the creation of extraordinary music and the telling of extraordinary tales, The Astonishing may not convert many nonbelievers, but Dream Theater can hardly be accused of not putting the effort in. Yes, The Astonishing is preposterous. But if you’re willing to give it a try, it might just blow your mind.

“You know what? We know we’re asking a lot!” John laughs. “We really are. It’s one thing to say, ‘Check out this 20-minute song!’ because fortunately we have a lot of people who like that kind of thing. But, ‘Put aside a couple of hours to listen to this album’? Ha ha! We romanticise the idea that people will sit down like they’re watching a movie and enjoy the whole thing from beginning to end, but we keep laughing about it, too, like, ‘Hey dude, have you heard the new Dream Theater album?’ ‘No, dude, but I’ve set Saturday aside…’ Ha ha ha!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 280, January 2016

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s.