Andy Tillison Returns with 'Tangent for One'
The latest Tangent album is a solo album that endeavors to sound like the whole band.
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection! If you’ve been plugged into the modern progressive rock scene at all over the last couple of decades, you’re likely familiar with The Tangent, a band that has undergone several iterations under the leadership of composer, vocalist, and keyboardist Andy Tillison. The latest iteration, however, is a different animal. Faced with availability constraints from his bandmates, who all work with other artists in addition to The Tangent, Tillison opted to dothe next Tangent album all himself.
The result is what is being called Tangent for One and the new album, To Follow Polaris. Tillison wrote and recorded it himself, but the tricky part was that he didn’t want it to sound like a solo album. It had to be a Tangent record. As a result, he did it solo, but he took the approach that he wanted to play what he thought his bandmates might play if tasked with recording the songs.
I was able to catch up with Andy (who I also spoke to about the band’s last album, Songs from the Hard Shoulder, back in June 2022). He was kind enough to give me the story behind the new album’s creation and background.
Let’s get to that story.
The Tangent returns — sort of — with a new album, To Follow Polaris, which drops on Inside Out Music today. The odd thing about the 13th Tangent album is that it is band-free. Composer, vocalist, and keyboard wizard Andy Tillison, who has changed the band’s lineup multiple times over more than two decades, does it all himself on this one, billing it as The Tangent for One.
Members of the band were off touring or recording with other artists, such as Steve Hackett, Soft Machine, Karnataka, David Cross, It Bites, Cyan, The Anchoret, The Michael Dunn Project, Argos, and Retreat From Moscow. So, Tillison decided to have a go at making the new Tangent record himself between January and November 2023.
Doing all the parts is not an entirely foreign concept. Tillison is a diligent maker of demos and essentially makes his own album prior to involving guitarist Luke Machin, bassist Jonas Reingold, drummer Steve Roberts, and woodwind player Theo Travis, at which point the rest of the band members put their own unique spins on the parts he’s written and the final tweaks take place.
But Tillison didn’t want the new Tangent record to sound like an Andy Tillison solo effort, because the plan is to have the full band back for the next album. Therefore, continuity was important.
“It’s not a shape of things to come,” Tillison said of doing it all himself. “It’s a diversion. I think that when a band’s made as many records as we have, it’s a good job to just sort of shake the tree from time to time, see what happens, do something different. And everybody else was very busy and (had) all sorts of things going on, so I took the opportunity to make a Tangent record that follows one path rather than the usual path. It’s been a very interesting experience. But yes, on this album, it’s entirely me to blame, so if you’re an Andy Tillison hater, you get to go, ‘Oh, it’s all crap and it’s all his fault.’”
How does one go about making an album by one’s self that doesn’t sound like a solo album? Tillison did it by creating different characters and personalities for when he played different instruments, and he imagined what the various Tangent members might play for those parts had they gone about recording in the usual way.
“Being in a band with the kind of musicians I’m in with does nothing more than make me reach higher every time to try and keep up with them, and be able to assimilate the ideas that they have, and analyze the way they play, and learn to write my music to give them space in which to occupy,” Tillison said. “So, doing it this way meant that I was leaving myself that space, and I knew I would have to fill it in a way that was in line with their thinking, because it’s a Tangent record. So, I played their parts in a sense. They’re not necessarily the parts they would have chosen. In fact, they’re definitely not the parts they would have chosen, but they’re the parts that I imagined that they would have kind of come up with, and they were the sort of things they would have done.
“When I was actually working on drums, I felt that I was a different character within the story, and I had to act that part of that character out. And I had to act out the bass player, and I had to act out the guitarist and the wind player and fight my way to the front. In all musical ensembles there’s a desire to sort of have a moment when you shine, as opposed to other people in the group. I was sorting that out as I went. So, (there) was the odd moment when these ‘people’ disagreed with each other, even though technically they were the same person, but I did have disagreement with the different characters I was playing in this game.”
The resulting album sounds like a Tangent record. There are five tracks that fit a somewhat loose theme, but it’s not conceptual. The album explores the subject of Polaris, the North Star, as the metaphor for following the truth in our modern age of selective facts, social media echo chambers, and skewed news pushed out by media conglomerates.
“The album is just a huge appeal for truth,” Tillison said. “It’s just aching to be shown some truth. I’ve found myself, since 2016, very much sort of realizing just how much of my life…has been based on truth being easily accessible. And then, suddenly, it becomes something that everything is debatable. Everything. You can have an opinion on what shape the Earth is, even though you can see what the shape is by looking at a photograph of it. But, you can disagree with that by saying the photograph was never taken and it’s a fake. And everybody will argue about everything, so you do not know what is true anymore.”
The album opener, “The North Sky,” sets the tone for the theme of truth right away.
I follow the North Star
(When all around me seems to be going south)
There’s a light in the cold sky that's always shining
Between all the fear and doubt
And if I ever get there I'll be sure to call
A fixed point in the heavens that’s way beyond the walls
In The North Sky, that’s where I’ll find everything I'm searching
The North Sky. Everything I need is there
“The North Sky” does a great job of hiding the fact that only Tillison is performing on the song. It sounds exactly like what one might expect from a Tangent song, and nothing seems to be missing. It’s a testament to how well Andy knows his bandmates and brings the sounds in his head to life.
It’s also a poppy number, if such a thing can be said of an 11-minute song. It’s upbeat and uplifting, particularly over the first five minutes, mixing in some flavors of Yes. Then there’s a tempo change, as the song slows and gets a bit jazzier for a minute, before a quieter interlude begins with Tillison’s bass and some (electronic) wind instrumentation taking center stage, and even some vibraphone. There’s some Gentle Giant and perhaps some Emerson, Lake & Palmer influence in the middle, and the song even contains some heavy Deep Purple organ.
The song, and the album, are generally positive despite the subject matter. Tillison remains true to his biting criticism of political stupidity and amoral leadership, while retaining his hopefulness that better things are still within our grasp. The theme of “The North Sky” is to focus on the unassailable truths and hold fast to them.
“I actually wanted to find something that was still true and was true for everyone that nobody could deny,” Tillison said. And it took me quite a while to think of it, until I just realized it’s there in the sky. The North Star. Polaris. It’s there. It doesn’t matter what shape the Earth is. It doesn’t matter whether we went to the moon or not. It doesn’t matter whether you support Trump, Biden, Boris Johnson, or Viktor Orban. And no matter what they tell you, the North Star is the one that all the other stars spin around, whatever shape the Earth is. And I thought, ‘That’s it!’ And I’m a person who has been singing songs about GPS cultures (“GPS Culture” from 2006’s A Place in the Queue) and GPS vultures (“The GPS Vultures” from 2022’s Songs from the Hard Shoulder) for years, and suddenly I’m looking at the original GPS that guided people across the seas before the time of Galileo and will still work after ChatGPT. So, we’ve got a focus. There’s something you can look at, and you can be optimistic.”
Tillison cut eight minutes off the song to make a single edit of the song, and it was the first cut from the album released as a single in advance of the album.
“A Like in the Darkness” was, lyrically, at least partially conceived by an evening walk Tillison took with his dog.
“‘A Like in the Darkness’ is one of the songs I like the best on this record,” Tillison said. “It’s a song about me and about writing songs in itself. I live on a hillside. It’s a very bleak, isolated place, and I live quite high up. I was on my way home with my dog, walking, and it got dark and it was very, very foggy. You could hardly see in front. But just for a second the fog cleared and I could see the lights in the room I’m now sitting (his studio) coming out of the window and stretching out across the countryside. And that, of course, is a light in the darkness. And I started thinking, you know, because there is this loneliness that most artists feel when they’re in the middle of writing a novel, or painting a picture, or making an album, where you start to question yourself. Will anybody hear this? Will anybody be bothered? Will anybody like it? Will anybody buy it?
“And I also was having quite a lot of thoughts about the way the internet’s changed and everything, and I started to feel a little bit alienated on the internet and not able to talk in the same way as I used to do for fear of being ridiculed and humiliated and insulted for having the views that I have. And so, I kind of felt there’s a kind of darkness on the internet that sometimes, when people put likes and smileys on your posts, it’s sort of like a light in the darkness. And so, of course, the pun was too big to resist calling it ‘A Like in the Darkness.’”
The song contains a nearly three-minute ambient section about three-and-a-half minutes in, which is a side of Tillison’s musical influence that has appeared periodically throughout The Tangent’s run. Sometimes it has come in bits of songs, but The Tangent has also released full ambient tracks like “Exponenzgesetz,” a bonus track on the special edition of the band’s 2004 release, The World That We Drive Through. Tillison has long been into that kind of music.
“I’ve always loved Brian Eno — his work, his ambient stuff — and, of course, I like Tangerine Dream a great deal. The ambient section within this song, I think, is more inspired by the kinds of things that Henry Cow or Van der Graaf Generator might have done. Slightly less lush, more kind of based around the saxophone and a few electronic sounds in the background.”
After the ambient section, Tillison brings the volume way back up with organ and other keyboards layered in and a rumbling bass before the song settles back into its original levels.
“The Fine Line” is the album’s second consecutive eight-minute track, but it contains a lot more lyrics than the much longer opener, “The North Sky.” It’s a more subdued, jazzy song, partially in the same vein as “The Music That Died Alone” (from The Tangent’s 2003 album by the same name) and shares some musical DNA with “The Canterbury Sequence” (from the same album). It’s about how there’s not much separating “regular” people from those responsible for making the decisions for us, but by some trick of fate, they’re calling the shots, and not always in a way that makes sense.
All the tyrants - the despots - the Musks
They have the power but they don't fool us, no!
They've got the platforms and they want more
But they need content and theirs is such a bore.
A Fine Line between Truth and Media
A Fine Line because neither of 'em need ya!
Because the knee-jerks work
But the Fine Line will bring them to heel!
“This whole (song) was inspired by a Venn diagram, and it was a meme that somebody sent me on the internet,” Tillison said. “And basically it was two circles. One said ‘The apocalypse’ in one circle. And the other circle said ‘Still got to go to work.’ And they’ve been brought together, and the bit in the middle says, ‘Somehow we ended up here.’ Of course this happened during kind of COVID and at the beginning of the wars in Russia and everything like that. So, I got this image in the song of a guy sitting at his desk with a coffee and a gas mask in his drawer. It’s just that sort of black humor, really.
“I suppose the fine line is just my way at the time of expressing the fact that there isn’t actually much between any member of government and me. We’re both just humans, but somehow this line exists and there are certain people who exist on one side, telling us what to do and causing all this trouble. And us who live on the other side of that line, and we can’t even see the line.”
The album’s epic centerpiece is the 21-minute “The Anachronism,” one of many tracks of such length scattered throughout The Tangent’s career.
“The long songs come naturally to me,” Tillison said. “And it’s not because of any particular skill I have or anything, it’s because that’s what I grew up with. Until I was 12 years old, I used to listen to Beethoven symphonies, which were longer, and I used to listen to ‘Close to the Edge’ and ‘Supper’s Ready,’ and ‘A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers’ and all the great long pieces — ‘Echoes’ and all that sort of stuff — when I was a young man, a teenager. To me, they all seem perfectly normal lengths for a song to be. They’re the songs that influenced me. They’re the songs that made me want to become a musician.”
“The Anachronism” isn’t a political song, Tillison insists, despite its lyrics discussing voting, and red or blue, and various types of government.
As the world sits back and waits for its destruction
Millions of kids go to sleep with Putin in their dreams
And no-one will do fuck all
Because they don’t want the system to fall
Just want those "X"- es in the boxes
So the Rabbits choose the Foxes
While the lines on the graphs are going down
“It’s not about that at all. It’s about my total non-acceptance of politics as the way we should live,” Tillison said. “I mean, it’s just a scam now. Everybody’s going on about, ‘Oh, we need to preserve our democracy. We don’t want autocracy, theocracy.’ They’re all kleptocracy. Every last one of them is just people feathering their own nests for their own good.”
The song reprises some of the optimistic lyrics from ‘The North Sky,’ illustrating that Tillison, for all of his ability to produce cutting social commentary, is still someone who believes that the goodness of humanity can prevail in the face of overwhelming darkness.
Musically, the song is classic Tangent. The wonderful keyboard-driven sections dance and play among surprisingly good bass lines (Andy said he has only had a real bass since Christmas of 2022), guitar bits, and woodwinds. It builds to a big (and optimistic) ending, as most good epics do.
“The Single” is an appropriate title for the closer on the proper album, as it’s the second single from the record, and it’s a song that’s a bit more open and accessible. It’s also the album’s shortest track, and, at 5:32, it’s the only song on the record that comes anywhere near the length of a typical single.
It’s also an old song, first written for Tillison’s prior band, Parallel or 90 Degrees. Tillison said the song would have been a Tangent song had The Tangent existed at the time.
“It was on an album called The Time Capsule. So it kind of makes sense. I opened the time capsule 27 years after I put it in and decided that I’d like to do that song again,” Tillison said. “It sounds like The Tangent. It doesn’t sound as much like Po90. And so, in many ways, it was kind of the first Tangent song, except it happened before. So, it was nice to bring it into The Tangent’s own repertoire.”
Lyrically, the song is about how history is being reported.
Divided opinions and divided broadcast streams
We seek sanctuary in whatever fits our schemes
We can find a deity that’s got more likes than yours
Stay safe in the echo chambers - always get applause
“Back in the 1990s, I was quite concerned about the way progressive rock music in itself was being represented by organizations like the BBC and CBS, as being this kind of fuddy duddy old music that was pretentious, boring, and all that kinds of stuff,” Tillison said. “And I thought if we let organizations like the BBC and Cable Network News write the history that way, that’s the way people in the future might see the history. And they’re writing it wrong, because it was a really good form of music that had lots of exciting things about it — a fabulous fusion of ideas — and why present it in such a horrible way? And, of course, I could apply the sentiment of that song in 1997 to the way politics is being run today and that people are writing their own histories. The BBC is saying one thing and GB News, which is our kind of British, cheapo equivalent of FOX (is saying somethting else).”
Those familiar with Parallel or 90 Degrees can hear some of that band’s DNA in the song, but Tillison is right — it’s quite Tangent-y as well. The keyboard theatrics between the third and fourth minutes always bring a smile to my face.
The bonus track is an interesting experimental number, “Tea at Betty’s Simulation,” a 17-minute meandering track that starts as a soft, jazzy song that stretches out and goes to unusual places. It was a bit of a Tillison thought experiment. Tillison said he originally intended the track to be part of a different project that hasn’t quite come together yet.
The song presents the scenario of a jazz band playing at a posh tea room — a real place — getting bored, and then playing all kinds of different things, yet no one notices.
“(Betty’s) might have a piano or a jazz trio playing very quietly in the background,” Tillison said. “And there’ll be the chinking of cutlery and crockery. Everything ridiculously priced. And it’s all set in a very quaint old English setting. It’s lovely. And I just kind of thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if the band were just playing this inane jazzy music in the background that nobody’s really listening to except for the occasional polite (applause).’ So, I thought, ‘Well, let’s have the band getting bored and frustrated, and starting to do stuff that they’re not really supposed to do, and nobody stops them.’
“So, after they’d been playing for about five minutes, something different starts. You start to get a bit of fusion, and just a few minutes later it’s turned into death metal. Then it’s gone sort of funky, then there’s a prog bit, and then there’s a mad vibrophone solo like something out of Zappa. Then it turns into this sort of grinding bit. There’s a huge prog overture comes in, and then there’s this bit where it kind of goes into drum and bass dance music, and then there’s a bit of 20th century classical, going into acoustic guitar, and it all comes back out into the jazz stuff they were playing to start with. And, in the meantime, there’s the chinking cutlery and everything has just been going on all this time in the background, and nobody’s taking note of the musicians. That’s all I wanted to do, just give this ridiculous idea and create it in sound, really.”
If there’s a criticism I have of the album, it’s that I miss the acoustic drums, but it’s a minor quibble. Aside from that, it’s another solid Tangent album in a catalog full of gems. I’m not sure where it will ultimately slot into my ranking of the band’s releases, but it will land comfortably in the upper half, I would think.
The lyrics vary between witty and cutting, as always. The music melds multiple progressive, classical, and jazz influences with modern, urban styles (including a splash of hip hop without the rapping), and even the longest compositions are able to hold my interest throughout.
To Follow Polaris is a remarkable achievement for a full band, let alone a single musician. When the band reconvenes for the 14th Tangent album, Machin, Reingold, Travis, and Roberts have their work cut out for them to follow this record.
You can purchase To Follow Polaris as a limited deluxe collector’s edition CD mediabook, including a bonus track and extensive 24-page booklet, as a 180-gram, double-LP vinyl set (also including the bonus track) in a gatefold sleeve, and/or digitally at all the usual outlets.
Tracklist:
The North Sky (11:36)
A Like in the Darkness (8:19)
The Fine Line (8:04)
The Anachronism (21:12)
The Single (5:32)
Tea at Betty’s Simulation — bonus track (17:32)
Learn more about The Tangent at thetangent.org.
For my complete interview with Andy Tillison, check out the video below or download/stream Episode 133 of the Michael’s Record Collection podcast. Andy is a repeat guest, so we didn’t get into too much background information, but there’s a lot of discussion about the lyrical themes, and his goals when setting out to make the record.
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