courtesy of www.metallian.com

"A regular paycheck would be nice, but there is something about poverty and freedom... they go together." The interlocutor is none other than the articulate keyboardist Richard West of British prog metal phenomenon Threshold talking to Ali "The Metallian". The man is calling in from his Surrey, England home on the occasion of the release of a new album called Subsurface which is the winner of Metallian's Album Of The Month award for August, 2004 and with that setting the tone nicely the chat weaved in and out of music, politics and the band - rounded out by singer Andy McDermott, guitarists Karl Groom and Nick Midson, bassist Steve Anderson and drummer Johanne James - and its upcoming activities. - 22.08.2004

METALLIAN: Richard, I take it some things have changed and some things have not changed since we spoke last.
WEST: I have moved out of the Czech Republic and back to England. I was hoping that music would support what I was doing, but it didn't. A royalty cheque can take years. We are still waiting for money from Critical Mass. One just can't live like that. I had to come back to England just to make some money from doing studio work. I am hoping that now with the new album and upcoming shows we can make some money. You can work out how much money is coming roughly. What you can never work out in this business is when. We went to the Czech Republic waiting for a cheque two years ago and we are still waiting for it. In the end we maxed our credit cards and we had to come back. We still have our residence there, but we can't afford to go!

METALLIAN: Isn't the band receiving money for its back catalogue in the meanwhile?
WEST: It's a funny old business. I'll just say that. It seems that the system isn't as good as it could be. I can't say too much because the problem with the worldwide web is that everyone sees what everyone says. Needless to say, the first three letters of the word contract seem to be quite important.
We have always said since the beginning that we do the music because we love the music. It is true and it is a privilege to do this stuff. We are not out there selling a million albums. To do that you have to be on a major label which is spending a million dollars promoting you. We are not in that big and high circle of finances. We are at this low level and, you know, it's fun to do. I think the biggest mistake anyone could make is to have too high an expectation for his life.
All the way through with Threshold we have been thinking, "yeah, we are going to be the biggest band. We have written great songs. We really believe in this. It's going to be massive, but ten years down the line we are still on an independent label scrapping a living. Sometimes you don't get heaven on earth. I am still hoping for it. Obviously, we've got a new album coming out. We have 'albums of the month' in different magazines which is big. I don't see many bands doing that, but practical reality is what comes back in the sales figures. We'll see what happens. People are downloading stuff now instead of buying it, which you can understand because there is a lot of rubbish out there. I think a lot of sales ten years ago were people buying an album because they heard one song. Then they find they didn't like the album and end up taking it to the second hand shop. People are now avoiding that financial trap by checking it out on the internet first. Even though it is illegal you can see why people would do it. Everyone has so much tax to pay these days. It is a shame too because the record companies are making less and they lower the rate they pay the artists. The artists are at the bottom of the food chain and things get hard for them. All respect to all the bands that are still going. It is hard and you have to do it for the love of it. We are going out on tour next month and we'll just enjoy every second of it.

METALLIAN: You say that, but even when the labels were officially doing well and there was no internet around to facilitate downloading, artists were not getting dealt with fairly. The system has to be fundamentally flawed.
WEST: Well, that's true. There are probably too many people who want to do music. That is what it comes down to. The major labels are always desperate enough to find someone who will sign a silly contract that doesn't give him any money. That's always happened.
I also think we were a little underachieving in the early years. We signed to a very small label playing music that was completely unfashionable in England. We were the only prog metal band here. When we should have been growing and becoming like Dream Theater, and bands like that, we ended up having problems with singers and about six drummers. We should have had consistency and shopped for a major label, but instead we were infighting and trying to stay together. Now we are in out late-30s and been going for ten years. That is not the sort of the band that gets signed by a major label. They are looking for the latest fifteen year old that is going to blossom into a fantastic seventeen year old. Then they are going to get dropped by their eighteenth birthday. We can make the best album in the world, but we are not major label fodder. They are dropping artists by the week, aren't they? To labels, their balanced books is more important than the world's culture.
This is turning into a very moody and negative interview. Let's talk about something cheerful.

METALLIAN: Let's talk about the new album, shall we?
WEST: There are negative messages on there (laughs). We are British. We are just negative all the time (laughs again).

METALLIAN: One of the first things that hits the listener upon taking in the album is how it is more blatant in every respect. You have always put a premium on being ambiguous and letting people think for themselves. Things are a little different this time around.
WEST: I think that's mostly correct. Threshold lyrics are often quite open to interpretation. It is not entirely clear what the subject is and people have a preconceived idea in their heads. Let's take the first song Mission Profile. People are angry with Bush for going into Iraq and they think that must be a song about Bush going into Iraq which it isn't. A few Americans have e-mailed us and they are getting excited about this wonderful anti-Bush song. Then they are off to Michael Moore's page. It's a song about capitalism and how it's getting into a bad way.
With Threshold we have always allowed for some interpretation and that is especially true with the last song, The Destruction Of Words. One could read it as the end of capitalism or the end of a person's individual life or getting to heaven and finding that there is nothing there. It has separate levels. Even when we are writing the songs we know there are separate levels because we want them to work on more than one level. We don't want them to have a song about Tony Blair, for example. We want it to be a lot more open that. I think there is a lot more value to that. I don't want to preach to anybody about my views of the world, but I do like the fact that we give people the platform to think about things. With the culture we have now you are working for some tedious job which you can't remember what the point of it was. You make money, give it back, go home, watch these tedious programs, you don't know what the point of them is either, but they seem to keep you mildly entertained, but never did your brain switch on and tell you to do something about it. That is really what the album is. It's a wake up call. Whether you are fed up with the record industry or you are fed up with politics we are all individually responsible for this world. If we put somebody like Bush or Blair in power to do a job, we have put them there. We all have our responsibilities, but we all sit back and tend to think that there is no point in thinking about it because there is nothing we can do about it and that is so wrong. We have this responsibility. The tiniest thing I can do is write some lyrics that makes someone get up and believe that we can change things, whether it's changing something in their office or changing something in their nation, then bring it on. Let's get people thinking again. The world is full of really intelligent persons who know they are being deceived, who know they are being mistreated, but they won't do anything about it. I think it's about time we do something about it.

METALLIAN: Let me challenge you. People recognize the problem, but what is the solution? What is the alternative?
WEST: I am not personally proposing anything in any particular political arena. That is not what I want to do. A man with a little knowledge is so dangerous. Let's take globalism or globalization and this whole idea that Socialism did not work on the national level. This is what is happening in England right now. They couldn't get Socialism to work in England because Capitalism is too strong. So they are trying to bring it across Europe, but no individual country is going to agree to it because they all like Capitalism. So they've set up the European Union and the European Parliament which is accountable to nobody, yet its sets the rules for the whole of Europe and they are trying to brig Socialism that way. So obviously my solution to that is to get rid of it, but I have no clue how to do that. I don't know enough about the issues to go in there and change anything. The whole point of the album and the wake up call is that if you are working in politics then at least do something good. Let's try to do something good for the world, rather than for our pockets. The whole point is change what you can change rather than thinking you can't change anything.

METALLIAN: Given what you are saying and a line on the album like "we've got a system and you're going to use it" the implication is that you want to work within the system.
WEST: That is open to interpretation. That particular line is specifically about Capitalism. The people who are controlling the world at the moment are saying that this is the system and you are forced to use it and you don't get any choice in the matter. That is problem number one. We put these people in power and then they say that we don't have a choice and we have to do things their way now.
That is one problem we have here with Blair, he isn't very democratic. He doesn't ask the government what we should do, he doesn't ask the people what he should do, he just goes off and does it and then says his conscience will be his judge. That's more like a dictator and it's fine if he's doing stuff than you agree with, but as soon as he does stuff you don't agree with then you think he should be accountable to somebody, preferably to all those people we have voted in to be in Parliament, but he won't do that. That is the problem. I don't know if you have the same problem in Canada, but Capitalism has become an old system now and everyone knows the system so well that they know how to abuse it and they know how to cheat the system. So you have Blair being a dictator, you have record companies not giving money to the artists; whatever context you look at you have Capitalism reaching its end. In fact, the album Subsurface was originally going to be called The End Of Society because that's how big I think the problem is. We have reached the end of this system and we need something new.

METALLIAN: What is that thing in your opinion?
WEST: My view is to throw out all the rules and laws that everyone's brought in which we have seen the tedious political agenda of the last so many years. Let's try to live the way the Bible said. There seems to be no agenda there. It should be a system based on fairness and love. I am going to sound like a hippy now. You look at Denmark right now. They have a Christian leader and everything in the country seems to be improving. Crime is down, prosperity is up and it seems to be the place to be right now. It seems that when you do things the way the Bible says, you get good results. That would be my idea. The problem is to do that you need to have people in power who totally believe in it and don't want to screw the system. Generally people go into politics for their own gain.
When we say that we've lost the art of reason we are partly referring to that and partly how we have let the system take us over. We are supposed to have the system help us run the place properly, but now the system is ruling over us and we can't do anything about it. Surely the point of any government is to serve the people not the other way around.
When you look back at early civilization people had problems and they chose a few to deal with the problems. The nation grew over the years and you end up with a government doing all of those jobs. They were put there to look after the people. You need to retrain the government to remind them that they are the servants not the masters. In democracy everyone gets a say in what's going on, but we don't get any say in England. Everything is just done. Now they are talking about putting satellite tracking in every single car. They will charge us for every single mile that we drive. We don't want that. There isn't a single person in the country that wants that. The only people who want it are the financial controllers of the government who want to make more money. This is serious and it is the most stupid thing I have ever heard. We need to find another government to do what we want instead. This is infiltrating every level of the government in England at the moment. This was one of the reasons I moved to the Czech Republic. I found the whole thing so frustrating. Life here is so expensive. You can't buy a house. As a musician it's too expensive to live here, which is why I tried going abroad. Of course, it was a rather ill-conceived idea.
Look at the war. Nobody here wanted the war. For start, it wasn't our fight. It was George Bush senior's fight. It had nothing to do with England. We don't know why we went. We were lied to about the reasons and nobody's happy about it. They are trying to get Blair to resign because he deceived everybody. People want to know why their sons had to die just because George Bush had unfinished business with Saddam.

METALLIAN: You say that, but every poll indicates that Blair will be reelected next year.
WEST: I am not sure I believe the polls. The polls are put together by the newspapers who have allegiances. Each paper is very much with Labour or Conservatives or the Liberals. When you see a poll you have to take it with a pinch of salt.

METALLIAN: Do you like it and find it fair to label Threshold an intellectual band?
WEST: I suppose so. We don't write songs about dragons and wizards and sex and drugs. We try to address weightier issues. You don't see many twelve-year olds at Threshold gigs. A journalist just told me that we are a 'thinking man's band'. He is right. The music is obviously incredibly important, but so are the lyrics for us. You have got 1,000 words on the album so let's try to use them, let's try to make them as thought-provoking as the music. If that makes us an intellectual band, then yes we are one.

METALLIAN: In that context, and I know you will try to be cagey, but let's address the cover artwork.
WEST: I like the cover because it works on so many levels. The most important message is that when you think you are seeing the truth, you are actually seeing a reflection of it. The truth is concealed below the water. Subsurface obviously means below the water. That is the basic level of it, but there are lots of lyrics throughout the album about different subjects and the cover ties in nicely. An obvious one is Opium which is about how television is the new opium of the masses.
Our artist is a thinking man's artist. When we asked him to do a cover for this album all we said is that he shouldn't make it brown. Our last three albums have all been brown and Threshold was becoming the 'brown band'. We sent him all the lyrics and the titles and I sent him a synopsis about the album and he came back with that. We didn't really have to do anything. We changed the words actually. We came back with the words 'reflect' and 'conceal' and the artist wasn't totally happy. The only criticism we have had is that somebody thought the album was called Reflect. We thought we could cope with that.

METALLIAN: You obviously vote and participate in democracy...
WEST: Of course I do. That's the only thing we can do. In England we just had the European elections. That is when we vote for English parties to represent us in Europe.

METALLIAN: I did notice UKIP.
WEST: Wow, you've heard of them, so obviously they have made a big impact. In England people are disillusioned with the three big parties and those people voted for UKIP, which is political suicide. The party wants to go to Europe and wreck the place, but it's great because it sends the message that we are really not happy about it. They are doing exactly what I love which is they have found an opportunity to go in and say things should change. They have done it. So good luck to them. I am not sure I would vote for them in a general election, but it certainly sent a message out. The thing I can do as a musician is write the lyrics and give these interviews and try to help people to see they can change things. I am no big fish and I am not particularly clever, but if I can help somebody who is clever to get out there and change things then that would be really good. The worst thing a musician can have is an ego and the worst thing an ego can do is to present itself to other people. In England, we are very reserved people so I am never going to say that I am clever.

METALLIAN: Turning the conversation to your music, and in your estimation, how does Threshold maintain both its heaviness and melody at the same time?
WEST: I know what you mean. We write songs, you know. You hear so many heavy bands that just write many aggressive and heavy riffs and shout over it. It's just a different style. We have a musical background and we love melody. I love the old Genesis records where you just didn't know where the chords are going next. You knew it will be something that would lift your soul though. There was something unworldly about the way they wrote stuff. It was the same way with a lot of Queen's music and I think that's the template. We want to write haunting melodies. Sometimes we do and sometimes we don't, I guess, but without the melody there is no point in writing the songs. As one of the writers, I know that when I am writing the melodies are the first thing I do. Even when you translate the melody into a heavy band setting, you know you still got that melody as the background of the song. You can take away all the drums and the heavy guitars, which we did on a fan club acoustic release, and you realize that you have a nice set of songs with nice melodies and nice songs.

METALLIAN: Which song is the album's highlight for you?
WEST: There are so many for so many reasons. Mission Profile is the first song that I have written with Carl - just the two of us writing it. For me, that's a real personal highlight because I wanted to write with him for so long. It's always been me writing songs and he doing songs with John the old bass player. I am proud of Mission Profile. A real personal highlight is Stop Dead because it's so quirky and it shouldn't be there. It goes all over the place. It's not metal, it's not pop, it's not prog. We don't know what it is. It just holds together and I am really pleased with that. Flags And Footprints, I have always enjoyed writing Threshold ballads. It's just a pleasure. The first album Threshold did had no ballads which I thought was a bit sad. Then Morgan joined the band and wrote the song Innocent and I was very happy. It was like opening the doors and we have been doing them ever since. So Flags And Footprints, I felt, is my best one yet.
Our songs just write themselves. When you sit down to write them you don't know if it's going to be a three-minute song or a thirteen-minute one. We see how it flows and where it goes and let it spin out from the previous section. The Art Of Reason is one of those songs that wrote itself. It couldn't be a short song. For example, we have made a radio edit of the song Pressure, but with The Art Of Reason there wouldn't be a hope. There are just too many parts that are related. It's a different level of writing. It's done when it's done. That's what I love about progressive metal. You have the freedom to do that. You don't sit down and write three riffs and a nice catchy chorus and you have a pop song. You can put so much more into our style. There is so much more room.

METALLIAN: Is the label servicing radio with a single off Subsurface?
WEST: InsideOut don't want to do singles for us. They have done them for Ayreon. They have done singles for his home country The Netherlands and I have seen them done here and there, but they are not the sort of singles that are put in every shop like major labels do. I think financially that's a huge operation and InsideOut are an independent label. It's not something they have done yet. I wish they would. Every album that we have done seems to have three singles. We think they could be number one on radio, but then reality kicks in and it hasn't happened yet.
The radio edit is a promotional service run by our street team. The label didn't want to be involved. They are doing it for free and they are doing it because they love the band. They are promoting the name Threshold. We also use them for the fan club albums we do.

METALLIAN: What is the special edition album?
WEST: The special edition is a record company insistence that we give them something extra so they can put out special albums. They have their reasons. We didn't have any stuff for them this time. We gave them some extra tracks and some video footage and multimedia bits. It's got a nice slipcase.

METALLIAN: Threshold songs have a habit of being very controlled and deliberate. The same is true for the vocals. Is that a conscious effort?
WEST: We work to our strengths and we work to a certain sonic template. We have strayed occasionally. On the Hypothetical album I did a song called Keep My Head which I hadn't written for the band. I was writing a pop song and I wasn't thinking of the band. For some reason we put it on the album and I think we stepped outside our template one step too far. it's a nice song, but it's not really us. I think it's a question of playing to our strengths. We don't go for the five minute free form instrumental sections. We prefer structure. Maybe it's a safety thing.
In terms of how Mac works, we had actually written Clone for Damien Wilson our previous singer, but he left the band shortly before we recorded it. We learnt a lot from that about what was good for Mac and what wasn't. It is a constantly growing thing to maximize the potential of the band. I am aware of this because that's all I think about. This is my life. Music is what I was meant to do.

METALLIAN: One improvement between the new album and the last one is the drum sound. The sound is no longer artificial.
WEST: There is an easy reason. I don't know if we have ever told anybody, but when Johanne came in, he's got two drum kits, and his main drum kit was set up with his other band - I think they were recording - so he thought it would be easier to bring his cheap kit down. It sounded horrible. We did all sort of stuff to try to make it sound half-decent. We were a bit disappointed by that. This time we said "you bring in your good kit, Johanne and also buy some new cymbals," which he did. It sounded great this time and it was so much easier to record too. You can do all sorts of trickery to make things sound better, but at the end of the day if the source material is no good there is not much you can do.

METALLIAN: The album features a new member. Old habits die hard.
WEST: In our early years we were really bloodied by this. It was almost a revolving door policy. We never found the same six guys who wanted to go in the same direction musically. That was the big issue. When we had Damien Wilson - he was a great singer - but he wasn't a prog metal singer. He didn't know what it was. He had done some prog in the past, but he wanted to do folk music. He was into acoustic pop really. That is what he does. He goes into a pub with his guitar and he sings for people. There was always going to be a tension trying to make him be in a metal band. It just wasn't him. He does it very well, but we were very unfortunate in that we kept finding people who wanted to go in a different direction.
Right now we are older and the egos have vanished. We are just happy that we are in Threshold and it's a nice bunch of guys having fun together and partly we have just found the right people. We had had the same line-up since 1998. We grew as a unit and had some consistency. Jon Jeary came to the end of it really for himself. He achieved all he wanted to achieve. He didn't see a huge future with Threshold. He thought all the potential ambitions he had for the band have been realized. He had written all the lyrics he had wanted to write. He also got bored with the whole process of going into the studio, touring and was missing his family. We are all in our 30s now and I think some people get older quicker than others. He is going to be a family man.
We got a new guy, called Steve Anderson, who used to be in bands with Karl and Nick when they were at school. They go back a long way. He is a local boy and he's always been around the scene, although he was playing jazz. He agreed to come and do the metal thing as a fresh outlet really. He is an old friend so there is none of those problems of having to know someone and what they want to do. It doesn't really feel like we have changed band members. It is a comfortable unit. He has been in bands and gigged, but never recorded anything. Same with our drummer. I couldn't believe it. He is such a good drummer, but he had never been on a CD before Hypothetical!
We have been in Threshold long enough to know that nothing is sure as far as band members. We always hope that we have found the line-up. Steve is not a writer and he plays what is already written. There will be a change of personality, but Threshold is one of those bands that can lose drummers, bass players, et cetra and it doesn't make a huge difference. There is a certain momentum to the band. Steve has been with us over a year now. He is enjoying every minute.

METALLIAN: How much of John's writing is on Subsurface?
WEST: None, John left officially at the end of 2002 and he hadn't written anything for this album. The intensive writing for this album started in November of last year.
I thought that John's departure will leave a big hole with the lyrics. Over the years I have written more and more lyrics, but I had never done a whole album. So with his departure I was concerned if I would have a whole album's worth of ideas. I didn't want to be the reason that there is a hole on the album so I worked really hard. I can't imagine writing another Threshold album. What more have I got to say? I put my heart and soul into that one!
John also had his melodies, but they would also get changed often. Regardless, John put his stamp on the band and when we write for the band his template is still there. We have this momentum now. I could be completely wrong (laughs), the momentum is from Karl, Nick and myself. We will have to see.