OVO

[Nick]

Hello Simon and welcome on board.

I was listening to Peter Gabriel's OVO album the other day and thinking that some of the tracks have a similar feel to the sound of the Imagined Village. I then noticed you had production credits and yourself and Johnny Kalsi were listed among the musicians.

Do you consider your contributions to OVO to have been an influence on the Imagined Village? What else helped to shape the way IV came together?

Cheers

Nick



Edit: This question generated some discussion about Peter Gabriel's new project. This has been tapped off into a topic of its own, here.

[simon emmerson]

Yes good point and one I hadn't considered. The OVO track you mention is called the Weavers Reel I think? It was written for the the Millennium Dome Show (which was actually very good despite all the negative publicity around the Dome at the time); Peter G wanted an exciting English themed dance piece for the show with loads of driving percussion, so in a way it was a prototype Imagined Village track. It was produced by Me and written by Richard Evans and Peter Gabriel. Richard engineered and mixed the track and went on to mix a lot of the IV album with Mass (he's also just mixed Seth Lekman's new record). Richard is a really accomplished music an as well a producer/mixing engineer and grew up playing in the North East trad/folk scene in the 80's. He was the head engineer at RW for years. A while back we did a BBC 4 documentary together called 'Why do Birds Sing' and we were filmed at Realworld Studios composing a tune called 'The Twitch' using bird song samples with members of the Guillemots (the band not the bird species).
Any was thanks for reminding me about OVA and I will now go and try and find my copy and have a listen.

[Nick]

I saw the Dome show several times and thought it excellent. It was annoying that the dome itself became dominated by its politics and that completely overshadowed what I felt was a very good production. The music is great though and Weavers Reel does stand out as an exciting piece of forward-looking folk music.

It leads me to my next question; would you consider approaching PG to appear in a future Imagined Village track?