David Longdon on Soundtracks of Our Lives

Now, why don’t we take a closer look at their lead vocalist? David is a fifty-two year old multi-instrumentalist and singer, one who is renowned for his work with Big Big Train, but also has one lesser known solo album from 2004 for you to enjoy. He is currently living in England, Nottingham, and sometimes has to work remotely because two of the band’s members are not based in the United Kingdom. In the interview—after we asked him if he had any reservations about joining BBT—he said: “I have been a musician all of my life and at that time I was looking for a band to be involved with.” A quick look at his personal discography will be enough to show you that the vast majority of his work is made up of collaborative projects. Maybe everybody’s already come to realize, but between this and last year’s Ori and the Blind Forest feature, we can clearly see that collaborative efforts are the ones that impress the most.

Yes, I think that including information about the songs inside a booklet within the album helps to enrich the listening experience and appreciation of the songs for the listener. We started off writing blogs about the material that we were working on because our music is very specific. We see ourselves as storytellers and we want our listeners to fully grasp the meaning behind our songs.

Some of our songs required us to research the subject matter and then it is a question of adding a unique angle to the narrative, to make it engaging. We often focus in on the human element within our subject matter.

Fans of Big Big Train have said how much they enjoyed the blogs that we wrote about the songs and so it was a natural progression for us to include background information about each song in our album booklets.

No, I had no reservations about joining BBT. I have been a musician all of my life and at that time I was looking for a band to be involved with. I knew that they were financially up against it and The Underfall Yard would most likely be their last hurrah. Greg said that there might be the possibility of making another album but it was by no means certain that we would. I liked the fact that we were a studio based band and we would remain so for a number of years until there was significant demand for us to perform live. We made the best music that we could and fortunately, we connected with a wider audience who responded positively to what we were doing.

Luckily for us, something clicked with The Underfall Yard. We then began to become more successful. One thing led naturally to another and we are continuing to develop the band.

2009 was a watershed moment for the band. If The Underfall Yard was going to be the last album, then we were determined that our swan song would be a strong one. We had nothing to lose. The line up changes were decided by the band, I was brought in and Nick D’Virgilio (ex-Spock’s Beard) was also a new member of BBT (he’d guested on some tracks on The Difference Machine) ~ I brought in Dave Gregory (ex-XTC) on guitar and then we were good to go.

Albums can be recorded remotely thanks to developments in Music Technology. So the album was multi-tracked (layered together).

We got on with each other as people and although the sessions were lengthy, they were fun. When you have the right people involved with a project, it runs smoothly. It’s like any relationship. We also benefited from the freedom of knowing that we would most likely never have to perform this material live. So we went for it and made the best music that we could with what people and resources we had.

Big Big Train had been together for twenty year prior to my joining, so they were established in the world of Progressive rock. It’s not easy being a progressive rock band as there was and still is considerable prejudice towards our genre in mainstream media.

When we released The Underfall Yard, the album was met with great positivity from supporters of the band and progressive rock fans generally. It connected in a positive way and it brought us a great deal of attention and momentum.

Progressive rock to us is extended song form. It allows us to develop themes and an album in our genre could be likened to a writer writing a novel rather than a short story. Greg Spawton and I write the material for Big Big Train and usually it is a process of us researching subject matter that sparks our initial interest. We speak often about what we have been looking into and eventually an idea is formed between us as we discover common threads that run between our writing interests. Once we have an idea or a theme for the album, we know where we are headed and we go ahead and make the album.

Progressive rock is a flexible medium for dramatic storytelling because it lends itself perfectly to the extended song format.

The London song cycle was written by my friend Greg Spawton, many of our songs are about landscapes and the people that inhabit and shape those places. If our songs can give people an appreciation of the places that we write about then that makes us happy. As songwriters, we try to dig deep and get under the surface of places. London can seem like a busy, bustling, modern city, but around every corner there is a different bit of history and a story to be told.

This is an impossible question for me to answer because I don’t have a single favourite song. There isn’t one song that eclipses all the others.

My reasons for choosing songs that I admire are varied too. There are songs that I wish that I’d written because they are well written in a musical and lyrical sense. I like others because of the storytelling within the words. I like the way that some songs develop structurally. I like some songs because of the way that they have been recorded and mixed. It can also be a combination of these points.

Then there are songs that I like because they are special to me in some way. Songs that invoke memories of people, places and circumstances from my past. Songs are indeed the soundtracks of our lives.

If you asked me today what my favourite song is, I’d say “My Friend The Sun” by Family. I think it is beautifully written and well performed. There is something truly wonderful about it.

But if you ask me this question tomorrow, I will most likely choose a different song.

We have our Christmas single out now. It is available on all formats. It is also available on 7” white vinyl, which looks beautiful. Writing a Christmas song was always an ambition of mine because it is writing to a specific brief. I enjoyed the challenge of having to format it to fit in the four minute thirty seconds 45 RPM time restraint. It also had to work as a Christmas song and appeal to a mainstream audience as well as progressive rock fans. Not an easy task to accomplish.

We are writing for the next Big Big Train studio album. We are co-headlining the Friday night, Night of the Prog Festival at the Loreley Ampitheater, Germany in July. There are lots of other projects in the pipeline too, so 2018 promises to be busy for BBT.

Thank you for the interview and thank you for taking an interest in Big Big Train.