by Ronald Smith
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The Minds came here initially for two weeks. They were really knocked over by the experience of being out in the country; they had been on the road for a long while, ceaselessly voyaging from city to city, living in hotel rooms. Here it was like another world, a romantic vision that began to infect their playing. 1 maintained that illusion for as long as I could, and they liked it so much they stayed for an extra three weeks.
They lived together and had evolved a sort of group mind, more than the sum of each player. They composed together, whereas in the past people like Bach worked on their own, composing in solitude. An unconscious telepathic awareness was developing; one would hear something in his head and try to get the others to play it in a particular way.
But they had reached an impasse, musically. They had a communication problem which I could see as soon as they started to practise. Even if they had been technically articulate musicians, which they're not, it wouldn't be good enough to say 'Play a C sharp', because electronic music is on a different level. Maybe by hit or miss the others would get the message, but it wasn't really clear. One of them would say, 'I want to make it a bit more - you know what I mean?'
I said, "You've hit a ceiling; you've got to start trying to think of what you want as a picture, visualize what is in your mind: a cloud? a story? Then you have an analogy, a better way of explaining what you want.
" We would talk about clouds and waves and what a colour sounded like. Art and music are both part of the same expression. I gave them books on ancient Egypt, or the Picts, or science-fiction, to read and think about. I would dance while they were playing. Coming in pale and worn out at four in the morning, sometimes I would roll a joint or just stoke the fire and sit, listening. In a way, I became part of the band.
They began to develop their own private language, and when I saw Jim nine months later in London, he said, "See what we did at the Mill; now when we're in a recording studio they think we're weird because I'll say, like, 'Give it a long green one' and we all know what it means; we get a whole fantasy going where we can see a picture, maybe a landscape with a track leading away. Our music broadened right out."
They could probably have worked for years in studios and never really have reached that point; it was the best possible in terms of energy and commitment. But one can't maintain that intensity indefinitely; eventually it would have gone off the boil.
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