Recording with Robin Trower and Matthew Fisher

The following article is excerpted from the book Gallagher, Marriott, Derringer and Trower : Rock Chronicles by Dan Muise: recommended for all fans of Robin Trower ... and indeed of Matthew Fisher! You can order the book from Amazon.com using this dedicated link , from Amazon in the UK using this one. or from Amazon in Germany here

 The Band has just gone through the Bridge Of Sighs period, some band member changes have been made, they have travelled the world, played the stadiums and are riding high on the success and attention this album brought .........

Author
What was the attitude when you went in to record For Earth Below?

Bill Lordan
Pretty much upbeat. But the album was actually kind of experimental. Robin was already going off in some kind of different direction, with more of an R&B approach. It was in LA at The Record Plant. Everybody was flown over from England and rented houses.

Author
Did you feel you were living beyond your means at that time?

Robin Trower
No, not really.

Derek Sutton
They had three houses in Malibu. They had drivers. It took three weeks in lockout time at one of the studios to get a sound. People were telling Robin how much money he was wasting all the time but he didn’t care. Remember something, please, and that is to English musicians from that period, the only money you ever made from a record was the money you got from the advance. And if you could con the record company into giving you a damn good time for a long time while you make a record, you’ve scored. When Humble Pie did their last tour of America for Dee Anthony, having been raped for every tour they’d ever been on, they just said, ‘To hell with this. We’re gonna spend every penny we get and we’re gonna leave Dee Anthony with a debt instead of a profit.’ That’s the kind of mentality that Robin came from. With Pie, there wasn’t any money to pay for it. Dee almost had a heart attack! It was the same thing with Procol Harum. Procol Harum used to do things like be on tour, and we’d come into New York and they would have a competition to see who could have the biggest room service bill. They would do dumb things like that. And they’d say, ‘Well, how come we have to pay for this? Why doesn’t the tour pay for it?’ It’s more an attitude of they know they’re gonna get screwed by somebody and so they’re gonna have a good time while they’re getting screwed. ‘We’ll spend the money now because we know we’re not gonna get it anywhere else.’ Bridge of Sighs was so huge but no one ever told Robin that he wasn’t making any money from it.

Matthew Fisher
There was a lot of pressure on them. It wasn’t the same relaxed atmosphere that had been going on in previous albums.

Bill Lordan
I don’t think the band had developed into the style that I thought was better depicted on the later albums. Matthew was there to produce. It felt like the beginning of something good. We were all looking forward to the future and the tour coming up. The wave had started. The interest and the excitement of the people that were into it. The jobs were getting better and bigger and the response was really incredible.

Robin Trower
Obviously, we were trying to make another great record. But I don’t think I had enough time to prepare for it. I had just come in off the road and hadn’t really had time to sit about and come up with new songs. But that was the way they were managing me. ‘He’s a machine. Get him back into the studio and get another album out.’ You were either on the road or you were in the studio. They had no idea of the ‘art’ side of it, what goes into creating it.

Author
They weren’t interested in investing the time to have it develop?

Robin Trower
They just didn’t have any idea. They didn’t have a clue. They thought, ‘This guy can just turn this stuff out.’ And that was it. They didn’t think, ‘Oh, give him six months to cool off and get regenerated.’ They had other acts. But how many of those got better and better, do you think? Not many. It’s a money machine, isn’t it?

Author
But after a while you would hope that they would see a pattern.

Robin Trower
Yeah. Maybe they did eventually, but it was certainly too late (laughs)! I just don’t think people thought in those terms in those days. That we, as people, needed time to create stuff. I think artists nowadays have more control over what they do. An artist today would say to their manager, ‘Look, I need a year before I go back in there.’ They put their foot down. They’re much more in control of their own destinies as it were. ‘Cuz they’ve learned. They’ve seen what’s happened to the previous generation.

Author
Do you feel indebted in any way?

Robin Trower
No (laughs). I’m sort of bitching a bit now but I’ve had a great career. I’ve gotten to play guitar as much as I’ve wanted to.

... As the band when in to record For Earth Below, two glaring omissions were engineer Geoff Emerick and the studio he worked out of.

Robin Trower
Matthew and I both thought that some of the drum sounds that were coming out of America were good. I just felt that there was so much great stuff happening at the time in America that it would be a good change. And I knew I didn’t want to make the same album over again.

Matthew Fisher
I was quite keen on the idea to record in America. I was interested in American recordings as opposed to British recordings. But I was kind of presented with a fait accomplis most of the time. ‘We’ve booked the studio and we’re going to go over to Hollywood, blah, blah, blah.’ It’s difficult to think thirty years ago what I would have done if I’d actually been asked. I don’t know if Hollywood was really the place. It was a really nice place to hang out. They were living in these houses with swimming pools and the rest. But was it really appropriate for the music that we were doing? Maybe if we’d have been in Chicago there might have been a better vibrancy. I don’t want this to sound like they went against what I was saying. I got carried along by what was happening. I suppose I could have objected if I’d wanted to. It all seemed to make sense to me at the time. But in retrospect I don’t think that was the best thing to do.

Robin Trower
I don’t think there was a depth of great material on For Earth Below, but I thought there was some very good stuff on it. The whole idea was an attempt to do something different from Bridge Of Sighs, which was not a good commercial move if I were just into cashing in. But I wanted to do something that was away from Bridge Of Sighs. You like to think you’re moving forward all the time.

Author
How was For Earth Below taken by Chrysalis as a follow-up to Bridge Of Sighs?

Derek Sutton
(long pause) Not well. There was a certain amount of Procol Harum-induced death wish in Robin. Self-sabotage. My remembrance of that time is that it had taken us a while to get this album together and Robin had refused input from everybody around. And rather than building himself a base of support, he had alienated a bunch of people. I don’t remember any details. I just think that he had not done himself justice. I remember that there wasn’t a track on the record that people could seize on like they could seize on Bridge of Sighs. And the result was, ‘This is a sophomore effort,’ even though it wasn’t, ‘and it’s a bit of a duff album.’

Robin Trower
I remember Chris Wright saying to the guy that was tour managing me at the time that he thought I’d blown it with that album.

Matthew Fisher
It’s a bit difficult to compare the two albums because Bridge Of Sighs is such a classic. It was a number of things that all came together. A lot of Rob’s ideas crystallized and the chemistry with the band all kind of crystallized. It was a magic time where everything really just happened. And I suppose the material was written over a longer period of time as well. But all sorts of things started to change after Bridge Of Sighs. I get the feeling that Rob got more into writing the lyrics as well as the music. I think he wrote a lot of the lyrics on For Earth Below, where I think Jimmy wrote the greater portion of the lyrics on Bridge Of Sighs. I don’t actually listen to it anymore. But then I don’t listen to Bridge Of Sighs either. I don’t listen to music much at all besides classical, so we’re kind of groping in the dark here. I can’t tell you what I think of the album, but what I remember of it. And what I remember of it is I think it had some good things on it. But it just didn’t have the magic for me. Whether that was the change in drumming style between Reg and Bill, that might have been part of it. It was just sort of a looser feel we had with Reg. I kinda liked that. If you compare those two albums just from the point of view of the music, that’s the sort of difference I’m talking about between Bridge Of Sighs and For Earth Below. It’s a bit harder. It’s a bit more rigid. It doesn’t have the same kind of swing to it. So that’s one thing why I would prefer Bridge Of Sighs.

Bill Lordan
It went gold. They say any album that follows a big album will automatically do that much business. Which might be true. Like I said, we were just starting to develop the style. A lot of the songs that were on there came out of jams and rehearsals. Where Robin later became more songwriter-oriented with structure. We’d do a song just around a guitar riff and Jimmy would write words. If it felt good we went with it. So it became more the ‘guitar stylings’ of Robin Trower. But we weren’t disappointed on a creative level.