Fanfare for Tomorrow
(1985)

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Engineer : Tim Hodgkinson
Produced by : Dick Gaughan, Ken Hyder and Tim Hodgkinson

Dick Gaughan : Guitar
Ken Hyder : Percussion

The tracks recorded on this album are :

• Sharpeville '85;
• Liberation;
• Fanfare For Tomorrow;
• Political Prisoners;
• Salute to Pitheid and Clachan;
• News From Nowhere

Sharpeville '85 (Gaughan/Hyder)

On the morning we started recording, the news was full of reports about the massacre in Sharpeville, South Africa. We talked about it for a while then decided to stop talking about what we thought and play what we felt. This was the result.

Recorded at Riverside studios in London.

The collaboration between Ken Hyder and myself was, on the surface, a strange one but on closer inspection perhaps wasn't quite so strange after all.

Ken is from Dundee and is a committed Socialist. He worked for a time as a journalist on the staff of Labour Weekly and we were introduced by Jack Mitchell. Although my approach to playing had always been fairly improvisational, it had always been within a fairly set structure, and apart from playing for my own enjoyment, I had never really done much free improvisational playing but we jammed together whenever I was in London and did a lot of talking. Especially we talked about the use of traditional Scottish music as the launchpad for improvisational exploration and this album came out of those discussions.

I found playing together an exhilerating experience and the concept of abandoning all conventional rules of melody, harmony and rhythm, stripping everything down to basic elements and then reassembling them, concentrating entirely on expression, was a very liberating one and has had a strong influence on much of what I've done since in that most of the song accompaniments I do these days are improvised.

For more info about Ken and what he's up to, visit his website at http://www.hyder.demon.co.uk/

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