THE DIFFERENCE MACHINE

The Difference Machine stands at the end of an era for Big Big Train. The most obvious reason why this is the case that it's the last album from before David Longdon joined, but it's worth noting that the lineup shift between this one and The Underfall Yard was even more significant than that; Dave Gregory joined on guitar, Nick D'Virgilio of Spock's Beard joined on drums, and for the run of albums from The Underfall Yard to The Second Brightest Star the fivesome of Gregory, D'Virgilio, Longdon, and Big Big Train co-founders Gregory Spawton and Andy Poole would be the core of the band even as other members were added to the ensemble here and there.

The lineup shift in between The Difference Machine and The Underfall Yard, however, is not just significant for who showed up: it's also notable for who left, since it's the last album with Steve Hughes and Sean Filkins. Hughes had been a stalwart of the group, appearing on every prior release except Bard - and you get the impression that even the band members who were on Bard wish they hadn't been, because the band haven't even tried to reclaim it the way they did with English Boy Wonders. With his disappearance, only Andy Poole and Greg Spawton remain of the original lineup, and whilst the early years of Big Big Train were patchy ones, I still think Goodbye To The Age of Steam was a classic and losing another link to it feels like the end of an age.

Sean Filkins might not have had as long a tenure in the band as any of the other three members on this album, but he'd also been on Gathering Speed, with this album made by four of the same five band members as that one (founding keyboardist Ian Cooper departed after Gathering Speed, leaving Greg Spawton to handle that side of things) you can see Gathering Speed and The Difference Machine as forming a sort of middle period for Big Big Train - bringing a level of stability which they hadn't had since Goodbye To The Age of Steam, rekindling hope in the project after the demoralising mess of Bard, and paving the way for The Underfall Yard to kick off a new era for the group.

However, there's a fascinating contrast between the two. Gathering Speed seemed like a shift from the blend of classic and neo-prog influences and 1990s indie rock which the early band explored to a more purely classic prog influenced style. On the Difference Engine, they take those influences and use it to construct this murky, mysterious atmosphere - like Genesis trying to chart their way into space rock realms but they used a chart drawn by Van der Graaf Generator so they end up falling into a black hole or something.

As well as being a strong coda to the brief Sean Filkins-fronted era of the band, the album also contains the seeds of the group's future - Nick D'Virgilio and Dave Meros of Spock's Beard guest, not only signalling Big Big Train's gently increasing stature in the prog scene but also inadvertently giving Nick a little audition for Hughes' drum stool. Pete Trewavas of Marillion also appears, and perhaps it's appropriate that Big Big Train's pre-David Longdon era was bookended with releases with neo-prog legends guesting (IQ's Martin Orford having appeared on Goodbye To The Age of Steam) - not because they sound like 1980s neo-prog here, but because they are once again here coming up with a modernisation of classic prog, albeit with a much more unabashed embrace of the sounds of the past and much less regard for currently-popular sounds than usually associated with neo-prog. Big Big Train began their career with what I believe is a five-star album; in The Difference Machine, they finally made another five-star classic, definitively putting an end to the difficult slump they went through in between.