Arena/Pendragon Keyboardist Clive Nolan Never Stops
The talented composer and musician has a lot of new music coming out in the near future. Here's what's on the horizon for his many projects.
Welcome to another edition of Michael’s Record Collection and thank you for spending part of your day with me. If you haven’t yet done so, I’d like to invite you to check out the MRC YouTube channel and podcast. If you like what I do with any or all of the Michael’s Record Collection platforms and want to support these efforts, you can sign up at the level that works best for you at patreon.com/michaelsrecordcollection. You’ll be compensated with extra value based on what tier you select, feel great about supporting independent writing/podcasting, and, eventually, receive a better product (and more of it), as your support will allow for equipment upgrades and more features.
For this week’s edition, I spoke with composer and keyboard wizard Clive Nolan, who is best known for his work in the progressive rock bands Arena and Pendragon. Clive’s got some new music that just came out and he has a lot more coming out in the near future. Let’s catch up with Clive…
Clive Nolan is a busy man. While many musicians might be content to be part of one band, Nolan splits his time between two primary bands. He also writes musicals and composes lots of other music that ends up in projects such as solo works and collaborations with musicians like Oliver Wakeman.
“I can only ever do one thing at a time,” Nolan said. “Pendragon and Arena are the two main operational bands. All the other things would probably be classed as sort of projects, so they come and go.”
In fact, Nolan has been so prolific with his writing during the pandemic, that when I interviewed him intending to promote a recent box set of the Clive Nolan & Oliver Wakeman releases, he informed me about a new solo album slated for a Sept. 1 release, as well as a fresh musical he had literally finished writing that morning (!).
His most recent release came out in late April. Tales by Gaslight is a reissue of the Nolan & Wakeman collaborative albums Jabberwocky (1999) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (2002). The two records were intended to be part of a trilogy of recordings about classic dark fables. The third release was going to be based on the iconic Mary Shelley work, Frankenstein. Unfortunately, that third Nolan & Wakeman album was shelved years ago.
“At the time, the record company was Verglas, which was basically Arena’s label, so we were sort of doing it as a side project, but we simply didn't have the facilities to have enough budget to be able to do justice to this album,” Nolan explained. “And so, we just thought, ‘well it's probably easier to leave it to one side at the moment.’ At the time, I don't think Oliver or I expected that it wouldn't happen. I think it was just a delay, but of course, it grew.”
Some of the material intended for the Frankenstein-based release has been unearthed, re-recorded, put together with some unused material from Jabberwocky and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and packaged together in the Tales by Gaslight box set with reissues of the two Nolan & Wakeman albums.
Tales by Gaslight, is available from Burning Shed and includes three discs, each with 16-page booklets, including lyrics, previously unseen artwork, and many stories behind the creation of the music from both Wakeman and Nolan. There are 30 minutes of material from what would have been the Frankenstein release, as well as several tracks from previous sessions. One of the interesting inclusions is an original reading of the “Jabberwocky” poem by progressive rock legend Rick Wakeman — Oliver’s father.
“There's some off cuts, leftovers, and what have you from the Jabberwocky or The Hound, but the most interesting thing was what we started to do for the Frankenstein thing. And we both searched around on discs and everything, and I found some old sequences. I had to kind of recreate them. So, what you're listening to isn't something I did 20 years ago. I had to kind of create them from the sequences I did 20 years ago, whenever it was, but I like where it was going. To me, it's a shame that we never really got to make the proper album because I think it would have been probably the best of the three. But it's a very good insight into where we were headed with the Frankenstein project. There's a little bit of the story in there. You've got a flavor of the kind of songs they were going to be and the atmosphere that was going to have.”
The time was right for the box set because it coincided with some reissues in Wakeman’s catalog.
“I think Oliver was getting help from a label to sort of re-release some of his stuff and then we just came into the horizon as far as that was concerned,” Nolan said. “He contacted me and said, ‘hey do you fancy, you know, bringing this out?’ And I said, ‘well, yeah absolutely.’ It was one of the most common things I get from people contacting me: ‘how do I get hold of The Hound of the Baskervilles?’ and you know Verglas stopped selling it when we ran out of the last pressing, and that was some years ago. So yeah, it just seemed like a good time to do it — simple as that.”
The three classic literary works that Nolan and Wakeman chose to use as the basis for their music all have a gothic flavor that appealed to the two musicians. According to Nolan, the genesis for the collaboration between the two keyboard masters began with a chance encounter. Wakeman met Arena (and ex-Marillion) drummer Mick Pointer at a radio station. Pointer suggested that Wakeman talk to Nolan and the two ended up having a chat at a pub. The two original albums and the new box set all came from that. Nolan said another classic work was strongly considered as source material for a Nolan & Wakeman release following Hound — H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
“We read the book. And we sort of decided in a way that the book wasn't half as exciting as the films,” Nolan said. “But it was still in copyright. It was still protected. So, in the end, we decided it was better to abandon that and move on, so we moved on to Frankenstein.”
The Tales by Gaslight box isn’t the only thing Clive has going on right now. In fact, far from it.
On Sept. 1, Nolan will release a new solo project entitled Song of the Wildlands from Crime Records/We Låve Rock Music (preorder available here). The new album, featuring stunning cover artwork, will be released on digital, vinyl (standard black, as well as limited edition ‘blood red’), a standard single CD version housed in a digipack, and what they call an “Earbook,” which is a vinyl-size book format containing four discs. In addition to the Earbook’s album itself on CD, a second CD features a special instrumental version of the album, while the third and fourth discs are a DVD and Bluray feature documentary.
Song of the Wildlands is similar in format to the drama of his Nolan & Wakeman releases, in that it follows a story — Beowulf — and has a narrator and vocalists serving as the story’s characters. It’s as theatrical as you’d expect from Nolan, but musically it’s quite different.
“I wanted to do a Viking album,” Nolan said. “Let’s call it a Viking album for simplicity’s sake. I was actually mucking around with an idea that was intended to be on the next musical that I wrote. But it took a sort of Viking twist and then that got me into the whole idea of the instruments — the sort of old instruments — and the sound, because the wonderful thing about Viking music is we don’t know what it sounds like. But we can interpret it based upon some instruments and the kind of historical evidence. I went online and sort of looked it up a little bit and found bands like Wardruna and Danheim and saw how they dealt with it and I thought that would be great.
“So I wanted to do my own interpretation. I knew I’d want to make it slightly more cinematic, which is what I did. Then I wanted to find the right story. And I thought, well, Beowulf is the perfect story because it's an English poem. It's the oldest English written poem in existence, but it's about a Viking. I went through the whole Beowulf saga. I found myself a medieval expert. He was able to translate in and out of Anglo Saxon, because I wanted the chorus to sing in Anglo Saxon. And the pandemic allowed me to do something which I’d never have done otherwise — I've got a 200-voice choir. I managed to get most of the recording done virtually as well. So the woman who played the nyckelharpa (Vicki Swan), which is one of these sorts of folk instruments, had her own recording facilities, and guitarists, and so on.”
In addition to the nyckelharpa, there’s flute, the lur (a sort of wind instrument without finger holes), and more modern instruments. Mark Westwood lends his talents on electric guitar and Stig Andre Clason plays acoustic guitar. Bassist Arnfinn Isaksen and drummer Scott Higham are augmented by percussionist Geir Johansen. Ross Andrews serves as the narrator.
Magenta vocalist Christina Booth provides a familiar voice to the proceedings, playing the role of Tyra. Ryan Morgan portrays Beowulf, with Gemma Ashley playing Solveig, Natalie Barnett singing as Freja, and all of it is supported by the “Wildland Warriors Choir.”
Nolan spoke well of all his projects, but he seemed particularly excited when discussing Song of the Wildlands.
“I'm very proud of this, because to me, this is probably the most unique album I've ever written,” said Nolan. “In other words, it's not like Arena, it's not like the musicals, it's not like Pendragon. It's got its own sort of flavor, very much so. And, it's very epic. If I can be a bit classical for a minute, it’s like a secular oratorio — orchestra, choir, solo singers, and there is a narrator as well. It’s the first time I’ve used a narrator since Hound of the Baskervilles, in fact. So, it’s a big story, and there’s a lot of big music in there.”
Once it becomes feasible, Nolan said there are plans in the works to do a live performance of Song of the Wildlands and to film it for a video release.
“Hopefully there’ll be a launch party type thing at the end of this year in Norway,” he said. “But there is a plan to perform a bigger version, a full version of this in a mead hall somewhere in northern Norway, where they’re building a whole Viking village. We’ll probably film the hell out of it.”
Nolan was also eager to discuss his new musical, The Mortal Light, a project that had been shelved for a little while.
“I kept putting this off. I wasn't happy with the story. So I kind of threw the story in the bin and rewrote it,” he said, finishing it over the course of the last four months. “I will spend a week or so listening to it, checking, maybe changing a couple of things, and then see what I can do to find money to be able to record it. So, if all goes well, this will be out...middle of next year as a CD. And we'll be looking to perform it live, probably in the UK, sometime at the beginning of the year. We might do another one of these big things where we have a weekend in the Playhouse in Cheltenham and we will literally do Alchemy, King's Ransom, and The Mortal Light — all three of them — in two days.”
Clive is also working with Imaginaerium on that band’s album, The Rise of the Medici, where he’s composing, playing keyboards, and even doing some singing.
“I don't normally get involved in other people's projects like this, but (Eric Bouillette) made several magic offers. First of all, well, you've got time, and second of all, here's some money,” Nolan quipped. “It’s almost like a combination of Renaissance meets heavy rock. It’s a concept album — three or four singers involved, sort of guests, and what have you. I think maybe the end of this year or the beginning of next year it’ll be out. It’s mostly recorded but the pandemic has stopped us from doing a couple of things, which we need to actually get together to do.”
As for Nolan’s main bands, Arena is in the midst of recording a new album. It’ll be the first with new vocalist Damian Wilson, who has a voice well known to fans of modern progressive music. Wilson is the former singer for well-known prog metal act Threshold, is a member of Headspace (along with Oliver Wakeman’s brother, Adam), and has performed with Landmarq, Ayreon, and Star One. He takes over for Paul Manzi, who spent a decade as the voice of Arena and has recently taken the job as the full time singer for the legendary glam rock band Sweet.
The drums, keyboards, and lead vocals have all been recorded for the new Arena record and Nolan said “it’s down to the guitars and trimmings.” Nolan said the new Arena record will be a single album but may have a special edition with a second disc. He’d also like to perform a show “for the world” with a special gig with a live stream on the album’s release day.
Pendragon is scheduled to tour the UK early next year. There were European dates that had to be postponed', so for now it appears just to be in the UK, pending changes in the world’s pandemic situation.
With all of this going on, it sounds like Clive Nolan will be busy for the foreseeable future and fans of his music will reap the benefits for some time to come.
For more of my conversation with Clive, including how he got started playing keyboards, the first album he bought, the last one he listened to, and more, check out the video below:
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