Uh, why a new album now? Well, um, several reasons. Um, one, uh, is that it's, it's about time for a new studio album. The last studio album we had was As Far As I Can See [2004], and I think that was about five or six years ago, and it really felt time for, um, uh, an enjoy- a really enjoyable experience of, of, of seeing what the band could do.
This is one of the things we're often asked, um, uh, why aren't Chris and Hugh in the band? Now, I've got great admiration for Chris and Hugh, but you have to realise that, um, when Colin and I got back together again, it was in the year 2000; it was a complete accident. I was doing, um, a charity show for John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, um, for their new theater, to raise money for it. Colin was in the audience, and on the spur of the moment, he got up and sang 'She's Not There' and 'Time of the Season.' We had such a ball playing together, it suddenly felt as if we'd been playing together two weeks ago and not, not, um, whatever it had been, thirty-something years. Um, and Colin said, 'Why don't we do half a dozen gigs?' and so we did, and those half a dozen gigs have turned into ten years of touring around the world, completely unplanned, but during that time, um, the band that we formed around us has gradually grown into itself, and it's become more and more pleasurable. Um, now, Hugh and Chris, uh, I'm sure Chris doesn't wanna be on the road for, um, several months a year, um, which, which we are indeed now. Um, Chris really gave up playing live bass many years ago, um, but, uh, it was wonderful to have, have, uh, Chris and Hugh play on the Odessey and Oracle concerts. It was fantastic, but we saw that very much as a one-off.
Well, the Red House is this studio that you see around me here. Um, this is my own studio that's only, uh, used these days absolutely for my own things. Our engineer, Steve Orchard, um, uh, helped me recently revamp the studio totally, um, and we decided to do this new studio album totally here and mix it here.
We wanted it to be a very natural-sounding album, very organic, and what I mean by that is as few overdubs as possible. Um, I mean, we, we weren't being dogmatic about it; there are some overdubs on the album, but very few really, and we wanted it to be material that we could translate, um, to playing on stage. Um, again, through the live experience that we've had, I think the band sounds so great on stage now that we wanted to capture some of that inter-reaction between all the players, and it's been a, such a joy making this album. It's been a hugely enjoyable experience from start to finish, um, and, um, we've got the result here, and we're, we're very excited by it.
