Posted yesterday at 6:00 p.m.
Gavin Harrison may admit to being associated with progressive rock, he rejects labels.
“Styles are a good way to ignore what you’ve accomplished in your career,” says the 58-year-old drummer. If you present yourself as a jazz musician, people will associate you with that kind of music. I was labeled as a prog drummer, but I didn’t grow up listening to that music! I grew up listening to jazz and popular English music at the time, mostly punk stuff. In short, if you can listen to Miles Davis and punk in the same minute, you don’t care about genres. »
No wonder then to hear him tell us that he doesn’t bother with styles. He is also happy to see how much the appetite for different forms of music has grown over the past few years, the boundaries between different genres being more and more blurred according to him.
PHOTO FROM THE PORCUPINE TREE FACEBOOK PAGE
Drummer Gavin Harrison
“I’m going all out”
“It’s either good or bad, I just let myself be guided towards the good things, supports the Briton. After all, it’s all about rhythm, chords, melodies. So it can be fun on occasion to take a death metal personality, for example, even if I don’t know anything about this kind of music. If I feel a part of a song needs something aggressive, I go all out. »
Gavin Harrison does not hesitate to resort to techniques such as blast beats, normally reserved for extreme forms of metal. You can hear it on the new album give it backa retelling of old Pineapple Thief songs, the original versions of which were recorded before his arrival, in 2016.
IMAGE PROVIDED BY KSCOPE
give it backfrom The Pineapple Thief
“When I joined the band for the album Your Wilderness, I had to learn old songs to play them on tour, he recalls. Some had been recorded with drum machines, Bruce [Soord, le compositeur principal] told me I could do whatever I wanted with the songs. So I created some new arrangements for the tour and the guys really liked it. I suggested doing the same with other songs in their repertoire. I thus arrived with a radically different version of Wretched Soul which Bruce found fantastic. I then proposed to make an album with these re-readings; we arrived with 15 or 16 new versions, we chose 12 from the album. »
This isn’t the first time Harrison has put his spin on songs recorded by other artists. In fact, he’s been responsible for the time signature of songs played live by King Crimson since 2008, with the blessing of the iconic band’s founder, Robert Fripp.
“King Crimson is a completely different beast to all the other bands, with its own philosophy,” Harrison exclaims of the band, which features three drummers performing. “When I joined the band, Robert came to the house to tell me what songs we were going to play.
When I told him I didn’t have any King Crimson albums, he smiled at me and said, “That’s awesome!” So I had with King Crimson the same approach as with the project give it back of Pineapple Thief; I redid most of the arrangements of the three drum scores, even though I didn’t know the original versions. I wasn’t influenced by those historical scores, and Robert loves that, it gives the songs a new attitude.
Gavin Harrison
While waiting to hit the road again with King Crimson, Gavin Harrison will complete the North American tour of Pineapple Thief, which is also happening this Tuesday at the Palais Montcalm in Quebec City, before flying to Vancouver on June 3. After which he will focus on the return of Porcupine Tree, his original band formed with Steven Wilson and Richard Barbieri, with whom he has not played since 2010. “We will be in a whirlwind of promotion around the new album, after which we are going to do our rehearsals in August, the percussionist tells us. It’s quite big, actually, a lot more than when we put the band on hold. We realized that the legend of the group had grown a lot over the years. »
The trio’s new album, Closing/Continuing, will be launched on June 24, the tour will follow from September 10 in Toronto, with a stop at Place Bell in Laval two days later. As for The Pineapple Thief, Gavin Harrison tells us that a new album is already in the works, with a planned release in late spring 2023. Besides, nothing to add to my diary until then! he concludes with a laugh.