Bill Bruford is one of the world’s most pioneering drummers. Bill has just compiled Making A Song and Dance: A Complete Career Collection, a 6CD Boxset that charts his musical highlights. In this career spanning interview with Jason Barnard, Bill looks back over his time in Yes, King Crimson and own Bruford and Earthworks projects.
The way that the box set is compiled, you stuck away from trying to fit it into so-called musical styles and actually more about ways of whether you’ve collaborated with other artists or you as a leader?
Yeah. This is, you know, the way drummers work. I think people tend to think, you know, drummers slit wrists, mingle blood, join Led Zeppelin forever and job done. It’s in fact a little more complicated than that and people like me go between various ways of working with people, often with a leader, or as a band leader, or for a leader, or without a leader and these are often different ways of looking at the way you’re going to approach the music. And so the box set is divided along those lines. So the first lot is all about collaboration with groups and then a lot of music from me as a leader with Bill Bruford’s Earthworks or the band Bruford. And quite a lot of music as a special guest, where you’re working for a leader, so what I’m playing there is not really my own choice. It’s basically what will make the music work. And, finally, as an improviser where, on the whole, you’re working without any kind of leadership or direction at all other than what’s going on in here and that enabled me to, kind of, corral all this vast body of music into some meaningful sense. And if you don’t understand a word I’m talking about, don’t worry, because it’s all explained in the book – the accompanying book.
That’s great to hear. It seems a theme of your musical journey, even back in the early days in the late 60s, that you didn’t necessarily take the easy option. I understood you had the opportunity to play pro in soul bands and that kind of thing but you decided to continue with the group that ultimately became Yes even though they weren’t established at the time.
Oh yes, you know, you… Why do you answer some phone calls and agree to do some things and not others? When you’re a young person, you have no idea what it is you’re doing. Probably you make a lot of mistakes, but as a matter of intuition you say, ‘Oh well. This guy Jon Anderson and this guy Chris Squire seem like their hearts’ in the right place and they seem very adventurous’, whereas this other guy over here I might say, ‘I can’t see how I could work with you really because we’d only last about a week together’ and, in fact, in the Savoy Brown Blues Band, one of my early efforts, we lasted a little less than a week…. About three days. So that, presumably, was a wrong decision but there are, of course, no wrong decisions. You’re learning all the time about everything as it goes past.
And your drumming style, even in that early period, seemed different to your contemporaries that were kind of more straight ahead rock style. You were more adventurous on the kit?
That’s true. I came from a jazz background which formed me in my formative years and somehow – I don’t quite know where I got it from – but I thought my idea, or I thought what you were paying me to do, was to move music forward in what became progressive rock and that I was supposed to think of new things to do on the drum kit that didn’t do what everybody did and I didn’t have to be like anybody else. In fact there was a great premium put on differentiation in those days. You know, we were in the early progressive rock days, we were keen to be anybody at all so long as we were not like anybody else we’d ever heard.
Yeah. And you said that in that period you were in Yes that ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ was a track where you felt that everyone was contributing and was, in a way, one of the peaks in your time in the group?
Yeah. One of the peaks certainly but, more importantly, I think it was a sort of template; the first time we hit a home run – for what it is the band was then going to do. Until ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ we were a covers band trying to be a progressive rock group and not quite knowing how. After ‘Sunrise’ I think we were a fully fledged proper progressive rock group with, you know, a background. We knew what we were doing after that particular song.
And how did you work in the studio in that time, recording material such as that? Was a lot of it improvisational or was it more that band members had sort of key themes of whatever that you just augmented?
There are degrees of all those things. A complicated answer. I’d say we got in there and pushed and shoved really for our own sort of ideas. So, somebody would come with a chord progression and start seeing something that wasn’t very good maybe and then somebody would say, ‘Well, that’s not very good. How about if we did this?’ So the thing would take a step further forward. And then Rick Wakeman would say, ‘It’d all sound a whole lot better if it was in a different key’ and we changed the key agonizingly slowly and then somebody would say, ‘Well, I don’t know about the bass, you know. Should it be doing an F# there?’ And there would be a committee decision on, more or less, on whether the bass should be doing that there or not. So you can see how slow, tedious, boring and expensive the entire process was and, while we were constructing these things, we didn’t really know what we were going to get. We only knew what it was when it was finished. That’s common in most artistic endeavours.
And so one of your reasons for leaving Yes was that artistically it didn’t have the freedom that you wanted then?
Not really. I wanted to do something else.
Right.
I was very young. I’d only seen four or five people – played with four or five people. I’d not effectively played in public before Yes so, as my first band, very much my first ‘girlfriend’, and I just wanted to look around a bit, you know. Totally natural. I didn’t want too much repetition and I had a sense that I was going to go around the world playing ‘Close to the Edge’ forever so I thought, maybe, I wouldn’t want to do that.
And so how did you actually join King Crimson? Was it something that you saw a gap or Robert [Fripp] asked?
A bit of all these things. No simple answer. I loved the band – that’s the first thing. I let it be known that I wanted to play in the band but there was a drummer, Ian Wallace. [Bill has a flashback] I think Mike… Ian Wallace was…. Mike Wallace was a newscaster. Ian Wallace, I think, was the drummer at the time and he was good but we were playing together in the States, as a co-headline, double headliners, you know. One night King Crimson would headline, the other night Yes would headline. And I let Robert know that I’d really like to play and, eventually, at the end of the tour he wanted to change the group around after his sort of Earthbound era. I think it was called Earthbound – the record at the time – and then we reconvened a few months later and did Larks’ Tongues In Aspic.
One of the interesting things about that period of the group King Crimson was having a second percussionist and that really comes out on Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, for example. How was it working with someone like Jamie Muir on that?
Well it was exciting. Highly unpredictable. I’d never been anywhere like that before in a group where I had to accommodate another drummer at the same time. All a fantastic learning experience. All exactly what I left Yes for. To be in a position where I was uncertain. I strongly recommend to any young performer who might be listening to this that it’s essential that twice a year, as a musician, you put yourself in a position musically where you have absolutely no idea how to fulfil the brief – how to play the music properly – and it took a while for me to find out certainly how to work with Jamie. And then he left and then I was on my own anyway.
And in terms of leaving King Crimson just a few years later, was it more kind of the fact that Robert at the time was, or had become certainly, by Red, more difficult to work with from a person perspective?
I didn’t leave the band. I didn’t leave the band. The band left me.
Right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn4-ofDHk1k
Left me and John [Wetton] in the sense that Robert didn’t want to run it anymore. So we got used to a whole series of events whereby a band, typically one of the editions of King Crimson, would typically run for three or four albums or three or four years. Maybe about a seven year hiatus and then we do it again and then another seven year hiatus. And every time the music environment, the music milieu, the sounds of music and popular music, would move forward, and King Crimson thought it would jump on board and help with new techniques and new ways of looking at things.
There’s also quite a few notable collaborations, but with other artists, under the ‘special guest’ banner. One of those is Chris Squire on his Fish Out Of Water album.
Yeah.
I assume the obvious thing to say, was that because you worked with him previously?
Oh no. It’s because he asked me.
Yeah.
[Bill chuckles] So I said ‘Yes’ which is usually what musicians do. You very seldom say ‘No’. So I said ‘Yes’ and we made quite a good record, I thought. Not bad at all in his home studio.
And because that was a solo project, was it kind of easier for you in a way that you could just kind of take direction or was it more difficult?
Good question. I think, yes. If you’re working for somebody else you and it’s clearly their record, then you have a little less emotional involvement. You’re not being asked to write the music, you’re not being asked to design the music in any sense, so to some degree there’s less of you in the recording and sometimes that’s nice. You know, if you just come out of King Crimson, where you’re emotionally drained, generally speaking, and you’ve given everything you possibly can, to play with Roy Harper on tour or Chris Squire or Steve Howe, it was a bit more relaxing. Yeah.
And in that period also you worked with Roy Harper, as you’ve just said, and Roy’s actually said in retrospect that the band that you had there with him, Chris Spedding, Dave Cochran [ostensibly put together in 1975 for Roy Harper’s eighth studio album HQ] that was actually a band that was one that he should have kept together. Do you recall how good it felt playing with that group?
Yeah. We were a pretty solid crew. We had a nice tour, I think in ’75. Probably did Knebworth, I think. Good stuff. And I probably would have continued – well, I’m not sure how long I would have continued, because I was gravitating towards my first band Bruford, under my own name. When I use that name, Bruford, it sounds a bit funny when I say it but think of it in the context of bands like Santana, you know, or Argent, Rod Argent’s band or, you know, Carlos Santana’s band. It was along those lines. That’s the way I was thinking of. So I was working towards that and I’m not sure how much more ‘special guesting’, in inverted commas, I would have done prior to forming my own band with Dave Stewart [keyboards] and Allan Holdsworth [guitar] and Jeff Berlin [bass].
So, by then, you’d had ten years, so I assume your confidence as a drummer had increased by then?
Yeah. I’ve never been lacking in my confidence as a drummer much, however my confidence as a band leader and as a writer of music were, in two key areas, entirely untested. So it was a bit of a shock running your own album, against the clock. You’re paying, clock’s ticking and how do you produce a session? Not necessarily easily when different people want different things and so on and so forth. So a degree of delicacy came into it and in that band, on the recordings of ‘Feels Good To Me’ and ‘One of a Kind’, I think I spent much more time worrying about what everybody else was playing rather than what I was playing, so I sort of played the drums as an afterthought really.
And in that period you were in UK and that’s represented on the set by ‘Nevermore’ but I’ve read that that was a situation where there was kind of different camps in the group – one which wanted a bit more of a commercial edge and another side, including yourself, that wanted to sort of be a bit less commercial and just ply your own furrow?
Yeah. I suppose so. And you could say that that artistic fault line was embodied in the group in the very first place, and you could probably see that before the album. And you say to yourself, ‘This might not last much more than an album and a tour’ but you go ahead with it if, and only if, you think that what comes out of that album and a tour is going to be world busting. And to be honest, you know, just introducing Allan Holdsworth to our American friends was just great. You could see mouths dropping, you know, among Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin and the great guitar players of the day. So watching him at work was worth the price of admission on the big American tours.
And you mentioned earlier about the different periods where you were going in and out or certainly in the King Crimson camp. You’ve got material from Three of a Perfect Pair represented. On the outside of that it seems like things were a bit more collaborative in that period, in terms of the compositions, for example. Was that actually the case at the time?
More collaborative than what?
Than how it had been for Red, for example.
No. No. King Crimson’s always been a collaborative idea and Robert typically would sketch out some ballpark area of how we might perform, that we would probably play on the pitch rather than off the pitch. You know the problem with musicians is ‘What are you not going to do?’ – that’s much more exciting than ‘What are you going to do?’
Right.
Think of it as that way round and, typically, Robert would illustrate his particular plan or pathway, which we didn’t have to do. It was only a suggestion. With a couple of compositions, or two and a half compositions, and we’d take it from there and expand on that idea. He was looking to us, I think, to elaborate upon some good solid ideas at the beginning. So, it’s always been a collaborative group. I wouldn’t have thought it was any different in the 1980s. We had a good songwriter though with us, Adrian Belew. He was terrific and had a thankless job of trying to find lyrics at the last minute of the recording sessions. It’s always the way – torture for a singer. So, no, not more or less. It’s just more of the same. The way of working with Robert was something you got used to.
How did you link up with Patrick Moraz ’cause your collaboration with him is also on the set?
Oh well, again, almost everything’s on the rebound from something else. So I think we would be about 1984 or something here. We’d had about three or four years of King Crimson, with some heavy electronics and some real sweat with early Simmons electronic drums. You know, King Crimson’s great, but it’s not easy. It’s not an easy band to be in and I think, on the rebound from that, 200 yards down the road I had a neighbour, Patrick Moraz, who I knew played with Yes and so forth. Very good pianist. And I suggested to him, ‘Why don’t we make an album called Music For Piano and Drums and just play simple piano and drums?’ How much easier can it get? Plus we can go on tour and somebody can provide a rental drum kit and provide a piano. I mean, how easy is that? I probably made more money with Moraz/Bruford than I did in King Crimson around those times. And that was a breath of fresh air and introduced a solid improvising string to my bow.
And in the mid-80s you also set up Earthworks as well and that’s represented again by some great tracks like ‘It Didn’t Need End In Tears’ which have got a bit more of a melancholic edge. What was your concept at the time for Earthworks?
Funnily enough, it’s not ‘It Didn’t End In Tears’, which is quite a good title. It’s ‘It Needn’t End In Tears’, which is another good title but aren’t they completely different, funnily enough? What was your question? It was a good question.
Just what was the concept behind Earthworks?
Oh well, simple really. The drummer would play the tunes and the chords on an electronic drum set and the other guys would be three single line instruments, so, in other words, not really capable of doing chords, much. That being saxophone, bass and e♭ tenor horn. That was, as it were, the blueprint we were talking about earlier. Now that was almost unachievable. We achieved that only in parts. Even so, there’s nothing wrong with having an aim which you don’t quite achieve but your spirited attempt to achieve it will nevertheless throw up some interesting music and, with the times that we did really use electronic drums, to be able to play harmony such as ‘Stromboli Kicks’ or ‘Candles Still Flicker In Romania’s Dark’ or ‘Pilgrim’s Way’ – lots of tunes – then it really was an unusual sounding outfit. But it was a jazz group.
And, as you say, you were experimenting with the electronic drum set at the time – the Simmons – and there’s some great footage on TV, on Micro Live, where you’re demonstrating the kit. Was it a case of actually, compared to acoustic drums at the time, there’s just a broader range of opportunities for the electronic set?
More than that. It’s an entirely different instrument. I mean, there is a relationship between a Bosendorfer grand piano and a Fender electric Rhodes piano, but it is tenuous. It’s only a remote connection. Electronic drums have almost nothing to do with acoustic drums at all and they can do different things and that’s what you want to use them for – to be completely different with them, which I think I managed to do a bit.
And then, in later years of Earthworks, you moved back towards an acoustic sound. Was it a case that you’d done electronic drums?
Part of that. Part of that. But it’s probably logistical. You know there’s an old adage – ‘You get the music you pay for.’ The problem with electronic drums in jazz is that the logistic problems of freighting them every day on an aeroplane and expecting them to survive as they come up on the conveyor belt and baggage claim in bits and pieces, is too difficult. It’s too hard to freight them about, whereas I can get an acoustic drum set of high quality anywhere in the world. So, just to make my life easier, I think we, really for logistical rather than musical reasons, we down – or step sideways – to a sort of muscular acoustic fusion which I was very inspired by Dave Holland’s quintet, at the time, and also Joshua Redman [saxophonist] who had this one ballsy fusion, as it were. Very acoustic.
Did how you compose with the groups change over time with Earthworks? I think that you used MIDI quite a bit in the early years. Did that change?
Well, once we got rid of electronics. Oh well, I don’t know, come to think of it. I think the main thing to point out is having a partner. So, you know, there’s Lennon and McCartney. I have always worked with somebody, partly because my rhythm ideas are strong and my harmonic ideas are less good and I can often be with a pianist whose harmonic ideas are very strong and rhythm is less good. In other words, the converse. So, Dave Stewart, I worked with a lot in the Bruford band; Steve Hamilton, pianist in Earthworks; Iain Ballamy and Django Bates in Earthworks. These are all co-writers and very useful. Very helpful guys. And one of the great pleasures of being a band leader is you can pick the young blood that you want to work with and they’ll give you anything they can to make it work. In return you can give them an international platform, which is what most young musicians – oh, and clean sheets and a good payday – which is what most musicians want.
Some of those latter Earthworks releases were live. At the time it was just easier capturing your sound live?
Yes, yeah. I think so. I think we’re getting more confident all the time. The live shows were being recorded for our own benefit and everybody sort of says, ‘Well. Why don’t we do this live?’ Added to which you can imagine the cost goes down a fair bit when you do it live because you’re not tying people up in studios for three weeks. So we moved to quite a bit of live recording and that was the way the world was going. It was all moving from big studios in London that had been the case in the 70s, Abbey Road and all that with Roy Harper in the mid 70s, through to live recordings and then eventually home recordings, as we now are. So musicians are in a permanent state of transit in between one method of making music and onto another and I just went with the flow really. Record companies were failing all over the place. Nobody was going to throw Earthworks a huge recording budget and say, ‘You go to Abbey Road for a month.’ They’re not going to do that, obviously. So you cut your cloth according to the cost, as it were. And that’s what we did. And easy to do with modern technology. When we started doing live recordings, of course, it was several recording trucks and it cost an absolute fortune. By the time I finished in 2009, 2007 perhaps, in Iridium [the New York City jazz club], it’s a small box and a guy with some little microphones and it’s relatively easy.
And then to close, Bill, in terms of compiling such a comprehensive set, were there any surprises when you were sort of digging in the material? You know, some lesser known parts of your catalogue that perhaps you’d forgotten about and were surprised by in a positive way?
Oh, I’m not sure I was surprised. Bear in mind, I couldn’t put on this everything I wanted to. That’s because there’s a time limit. Six CDs is only going to be some 60 or 70 tracks. Which sounds like a lot but you’d be surprised at the stuff that I couldn’t get licensed and that might have been fun to have some of that and then again the stuff I could get licensed and that turned up on the record. And I think that what you’re allowed legally to license is a big determinant of what you can and cannot use on such a compilation but 99% of what was on my original list for tracks we did in fact license, which is a thrill and BMG have been eternally helpful with the entire project. And it’s a big project. I mean, we’ve been working on this for eight months.
It really shows and, as you say, is the definitive collection from your music and thank you so much for your time Bill. It’s much appreciated.
All right Jason. Pleasure to talk to you.
Further information
- Making a Song and Dance: A Complete-Career Collection is released on 29 April 2022. Pre-order here: billbruford.lnk.to/MASDPR
- For more information visit billbruford.com
- A podcast of this interview is also scheduled for release on 29 April. Subscribe to The Strange Brew Podcast on your podcast client to not miss out.
Acknowledgements
Transcript and extra research provided by Nigel Davis.
