Bringing Down the Light

‘revelation’

The months before Sylvian/Fripp first stepped into the public gaze were dominated for Robert Fripp by a dispute with his management company, EG. ‘From April ’91 to March ’92, when I first played in Japan with David Sylvian and Trey Gunn, that was virtually full time, my life. Miserable. I’m dying…No artist can stand and fight something like this, because you give up two or three years of your career, at the least. It brought me close to bankruptcy, because of instead of working, I spent a year purely dealing with it.’

Robert’s royalties had not been paid and he would discover that income had been diverted to meet debts incurred by individuals with unlimited liability to the London insurance market, as so called “Lloyd’s names”. ‘In order to keep themselves solvent they used any money that was available to them, including their artists’. And in order to meet their liabilities they sold the EG record catalogue and the EG publishing catalogue, including all my work. And in my cases, they didn’t have the right to do so.’

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Weathered Wall

‘native to no one involved’

‘When I recorded Brilliant Trees, I started the album in Berlin, out of necessity, out of a low budget and it being the cheapest studio I could find, but I found that going to a strange place, meeting in a strange place — all these musicians for the first time, some of them I’d never even spoken to prior to meeting them — created a sense of adventure about the whole project,’ recalled David Sylvian. ‘I didn’t just feel it, I noticed it in the other musicians, and that they would give more of themselves in that environment rather than in their natural environment, their home town or whatever.’ (1991)

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Burning Bridges

‘our influences on our sleeve’

Richard Barbieri, Mick Karn and David Sylvian were all classmates at Catford Boys school in South London. Karn and Sylvian were friends, their surnames then Michaelides and Batt, the latter’s home being ‘close to the school,’ as Mick recalled, ‘so we would go there together for lunch, with his brother Steven Batt bringing a friend and joining us.

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Wonderful World

‘how beautiful life is’

The US leg of the Everything and Nothing tour wound to a close with a show at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles on 14 May 2002. It wasn’t long before David Sylvian’s attention turned towards new work after an extended period compiling and completing material from the preceding 20 years, firstly for the excellent vocal cd set which gave the tour its name and then for its instrumental companion, Camphor, which came out a couple of weeks after the LA gig.

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A Danger to Ourselves – Covenstead Blues

‘working obsessively with sound’

‘I’ve been slightly afraid,’ revealed Lucrecia Dalt as her album A Danger to Ourselves was released after months of intricate crafting and then the best part of a year taken up with the practical machinations required for its public launch. ‘I say afraid because I recognise it as a fear to expose the personal in music. I’ve always been somewhat reluctant to do it, so it felt more comfortable to invent a whole story that I could talk about, so I could detach emotionally and create something based on that. But in this one it felt for the first time, very naturally, like I wanted to work from the process of pretty raw sincerity.’

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