Studio - 1.Sky (Sky album)
1. Track listing.
1.1. Side one.
- " Westway" (Flowers/Monkman)
"When we recorded this album, I was living out in West London, and the studio was in Central London. Every night, I would drive home along the Westway elevated road and listen on my car tape player to what we'd done that day. This track is such a great groove for driving and it got its name because if I put it on at the Marylebone Road end of the Westway and stuck right on the speed limit, it would finish just as I came off the other end." H.F.
- "ICarillon" (Flowers/Gomm)
New groups, in the excitement of doing their first album, can quite easily overkill. The idea of Carillon was to have four or five minutes of tranquillity, a piece that any student musician could play in no time at all. Carillon means a peal of bells, two or three instruments following each other with the same melody, as in the chorus.
I hoped it would stop the critics calling us clever dicks. It did. They said "Musicians of this calibre should avoid such simple songs." H.F.
- "Danza" (Pipo, Arr. Peek)
When John Williams rang up Kevin Peek to ask him to join Sky, Kevin was out. The message was relayed to Kevin as "someone rang to ask about guitar lessons". Despite this poor start, Kevin quickly proved his value to the group by finding Danza, a lively piece by the obscure Argentinian composer Pipo, and transforming it into a perfect vehicle for the new band.
- "Gymnopedie No. 1" ((Satie, Arr. Williams)
Satie is a favourite for rock transcriptions, with everyone from Blood Sweat & Tears to Gary Numan attempting it, but Sky were not attempting to rock it up. "We played it with more arpeggios than are in the famous piano version, but I took everything in that arrangement from Satie's own sketches for doing an orchestration, which he never finished." J.W.
1.2. Side two.
- "Cannonball" (Monkman)
"This was one of my earliest attempts to find a fusion of rock and classical that would work for the band, and we often played it live as an encore. We must have thought it worked, because we put it out as a single before Toccata. Recently, in Russia, I heard it being used as the title music for a Russian TV current affairs programme, but I still don't know if I get paid a royalty for that." F.M.
- "Where Opposites Meet" (Monkman)
"As a group, we all came from different disciplines, and that's what Francis was thinking about when he wrote this piece. We were opposites in terms of background, but the music is the point at which we all meet." H.F. "Herbie's idea is interesting, but I was actually thinking about the Zen concept that infinity is the point where opposites meet. When we started the band, we were faced with a real problem about what kind of music would be appropriate for players from such diverse backgrounds. I was living in Greenwich at the time, and I laid back on my couch and tried to imagine myself in an audience watching us play. The opening sequence of Where Opposites Meet is the music I imagined then." F.M.
There are five "movements" and the piece takes up the whole of Side 2 of the original LP/Cassette release, lasting almost 20 minutes. The extract presented here is from Part Four.
- "Dies Irae" (Monkman)
(not on original LP/Cassette release)
This free setting of a well-known plainchant melody was released as a single in the summer of 1980. Intriguingly, the Dies Irae theme also makes an appearance in Berlioz's March To The Scaffold (from Symphonie Fantastique) which was the b-side of the same single. However, March To The Scaffold eventually appeared on
SKY 4 so, by reverse logic, we feel it is appropriate for Dies Irae finally to make its album debut on this re-release. F.M.
Not to mention because the original album was somewhat on the short side in terms of duration and needed something more to fill a CD.
Actually, to be utterly sad and pedantic, the theme doesn't appear during March to the Scaffold, but the last movement of the Symphonie Fantastique.
2. Personnel.
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