Edison's Children

Edison’s Children is a major new project by Eric Blackwood & Pete Trewavas. Their debut album, In The Last Waking Moments, is now available as both download and CD format. 

Having been part of the team evaluating the project for inclusion on Prog Archives, I got in touch with them, and they very kindly agreed to do this extended interview with me for the site. 

Eric’s responses are in red type and Pete’s in blue:

Hello guys. First of all, thanks very much for agreeing to an interview on our site. To kick off, can you give us an idea of how the reaction to the project has been?

EB:  So far the buzz has been simply fantastic, and the CD was only released on the 19^th! We expected a bit of a backlash because we did a few things against the normal “prog” grain and figured there would be some unkind words from some super proggies, but they have been very few and far between. I don’t think we anticipated this kind of immediate positive reaction across the board.

PT: I’m very pleased and very relieved that the people “get it” and what’s great is that the people who get it... really get it. I think it’s a little bit away from what I have done in the past in terms of alternative projects, and it is perhaps more harder rock at times than my other projects, but I’ve really been wanting to do something a bit more rocky. Eric comes from more of a harder rock background than I do and it’s worked out really, really well. I haven’t had any negatives at all, only positives. The album was released only a few days ago... on 12/19, we shipped out all the pre-orders, but the downloads have been available for the past month on edisonschildren.com, racket records (Marillion’s website), Amazon and itunes.com.

I should mention that edisonschildren.com has turned into a great site thanks to Eric who has been working on it, with lots of little bits on it and more pictures of me, which is always a good thing (laughs).. I was on tour in Europe with Marillion, and I even had some people at the shows wearing the 11.11.11. t-shirt. . The plan had been to release the album on 11.11.11 but it simply couldn’t be done on time. We’ve had some great guest appearances from the other members of my band Marillion, and I think getting that accomplished took priority over the release date which we really wanted to do because it was such a cool thing, but obviously it was more important to finish the album properly. But... Mike Hunter had finished mixing “Dusk” at the time (who had also mixed most of the album) so we put out a special limited edition version of Dusk... a little teaser  to let people be aware that it was coming out.

Along with your “Trance Remix” of Dusk called “Dusk (The Rising) which was really rather good but wound up not making it to the final cut of the album.. which Eric mastered for us. Thank you Eric! See… it’s teamwork!.  There’s also been a lot of new fan clubs on Facebook started by people like Andy Wright and Annick Gauthier that have drawn tremendous attention to the project as well... where people can go in and talk about us and get their friends to join in. We have some very loyal and passionate fans already on the forums out there... and if they keep on like this... well anything could happen with Edison’s Children really.

The project started as an idea in 2006, but has taken five years to reach the release stage. Why such a long gap?

If you’ve been listening to us talk then you understand!...

The problem is, my partner is the busiest man in Show Business! I really think he’s superman working full time with Marillion and Transatlantic and Kino and Robin Boult’s wonderful new project. He is Superman... right down to the red undies (and cape).

(PT: I’m wearing the red undies now actually... my lucky pair)...       very nice! And a good cape. It’s important to have a good cape (especially for keyboard players).. And Eric’s been more behind the scenes in the movies in New York doing Special FX and Props and all that. He gets to blow up New York every now and again and gets to meet and hang out with some really cool people.

Yeah I’ve been done quite a few of the bigger movies that have come out in recent years... finding time to mesh schedules isn’t always easy but we do find the time some how... in and around Pete’s touring schedule to get together and write and record.

Also the problem is once we start to record something, Eric will tune up a guitar and then start writing something based on something he heard while tuning... or I will be working out an arrangement on his Martin guitar and suddenly write something that Eric will turn around and say... wow that was good, lets record that... and then we’re going down another path that we were never supposed to, and we never get around to working on what we were supposed to for that day. We had written nearly an entire album’s worth of material in fact, going into the Quebec recording sessions, including a 25 minute song called Silhouette. Eric began to play me something he was working on (which would become Fracture) and I started messing with it a bit and we never wound up working on Silhouette. By the time we came back around to that song... we had written so many songs that fit nicely on the album , that the 25 minute long Silhouette’s didn’t fit anymore so it wound up on the shelf. That seems to keep happening when we write and there are times that I really want to try and remain focused but we start getting all creative, and writing all over each other, that it is very hard to get a song completed. Eric, however, despite how frustrating that can be, never wants to stop being creative because he always says that the best music writing always comes out of those kind of things ... and he’s right in a way. I tend to try and stay on the path and Eric will be noodling with something and the next thing you know ... we’ve written something else and gone off on another tangent.

Like, for instance, we were trying to write Fallout of the 4^th Kind and Pete had  thought that maybe we should do an acoustic version of the song that keeps appearing in different forms throughout the album. So he began arranging a quiet acoustic piece and there was supposed to be an acoustic guitar lead in the middle and I began playing this little lead guitar lick. Pete thought it would be great for that little bit in Fallout 4, but I kept saying it wanted to be something else, so Pete grabbed a guitar and started playing chords arrangements behind it. We recorded it and he arranged it a bit more and by the end of the day, that little guitar lick turned into A Million Miles Away. It was just trying to find a lick which worked, and five hours later, we had a completely written new song that didn’t even exist as an idea during breakfast. And... we never did get Fallout 4 completed in Quebec and it would be months before we finally did accomplish that in Ocean City. The acoustic lead into Fallout 4 meanwhile never happened... by time we got to Ocean City, we had now gone in a completely different direction. Thus to sum it up... this is why it takes us 5 years to write an album (laughs)...

We’ve also spent a lot of time, especially Eric, on making the whole concept come together... not just with the lyrics and things but also with the artwork. Wendy Farrell-Pastore did some great artwork for us and finding the exact photographs to match the moods of the different songs ... (those are actual photographs on the album ... not paintings), that tell the story took a lot of time. Also ... the songs when you do it all yourself take a lot of “librarian work”. There were so many versions of songs, from the beginning to the end that it took hours and hours just to keep up with what version of what song had the vocal part that we wanted to use and which had the keys the way we liked them. There are probably 30-40 versions of each one of these songs that get recorded from the beginning of the process to the end, so you can imagine it was quite a bit of tedious work to keep it all tied together.

Pete’s progressive music background hardly needs any explanation as a member of one of the most influential bands of the past 20-odd years, but I understand that Eric initially started off in metal projects, before “progressing”, as it were. Could Eric please give us a resume of his career in music?

I do come from a  bit of a metal background, as I was one of the founding members of a band that got a bit of press years ago called Crimson Steele. We were under the Twisted Sister umbrella a bit as A.J. Pero’s protégé was the drummer for the band (not that we ever toured with them), but we did quite a few high profile gigs. I also spent eight years in a three piece band prior to this project called Sunblister with Mike Marchetta and Nick Anson, which was often scouted by A&M and Atlantic. We toured heavily throughout the United States and our music was along the lines of the Deftones, Chevelle, Tool, and Alice in Chains.

I actually, a few years into that band, switched to bass guitar as we paired down from a five piece band to a three piece. We played The China Club and Webster Hall and our fan base was a very loyal one. I remember one of NYC’s worst blizzards. We tried the cancel a show because of the snow and the promoter refused to do so and insisted we show up... so we went expecting to play in front of the bartender and bus boy, and the place was completely sold out and it was one of the best shows I ever did. I really enjoyed the intensity of it all... there’s a great release to playing “in your face” kind of music every night and while it is not what makes me who I am as a musician, you do see it come out quite a bit on things on this record. I really have an appreciation for bands like “A Perfect Circle” that can play a song like The Noose and follow it up with Pet or Three Libras, and then The Hollow... and I think you hear a lot of that side of me coming up with things like Spiraling... followed by something like Lifeline.

Despite my harder influences, however... my first album ever I had gotten for Christmas by my heavily Rolling Stones inspired brother Garry, who made the odd choice for me... by getting me Pink Floyd’s Animals album instead of the new Rolling Stones record.

I was nine years old, and I put Dogs on... and heard Gilmour playing that lead and it really blew my mind. He also bought me Styx’ the Grand Illusion which had Tommy Shaw’s Man In The Wilderness on it... and the Beatles “White Album”... and music just took on with these three records... a whole new meaning for me.

When I was old enough to work and make some money, I spent every penny on buying new music and immediately bought everything Pink Floyd ever made and I began to seek out new things. I found in those new things... Marillion. I had heard Kayleigh playing on U-68’s video channel and had seen their album cover for Fugazi,  which peaked my interest a few days earlier. After hearing that song I went to the store to buy it and spent quite some time figuring out which album should I buy first with my meagre budget.... and bought both and didn’t eat much lunch at work for a week but loved every second of it... and I of course went out and got the rest of the catalogue before long.

So while I have been in a lot of “harder” bands most of my life, I was a Pink Floyd/ Marillion/Genesis/Yes fan at heart always... and even got my metal band Crimson Steele to start playing Queensyrche whenever possible. Blinded and The Warning, even No Sanctuary. A lot of Dio... When I finally went solo, I met Anthony Foti, He was listening to Billy Joel and I was listening to Genesis’ Entangled. Not exactly from the same mould, but we found some really good common ground and I wrote some good pop tunes with him which got tremendous radio play and versions of it are still getting Grammy pre-nominations to this day. (The actual Grammy Nomination list before they narrow it down to the seven for TV).

Our producers Dave Greenberg and Al Greenwood (Foreigner) also got one of my heroes on board at the time, to do the album with us... Al Pitrelli, who had replaced Steve Howe in Asia and played for years with Alice Cooper, Megadeth, and Joe Lynn Turner of Rainbow, and  is the founder of Trans-Siberian Orchestra. He is one of those guys who also started in Heavy Metal but did a lot of cross-over into Progressive Rock so I really identified with him. Pitrelli did some amazing lead guitar work on the Haunted Memories album. Aaron Joy, a Heavy Metal columnist for many years that has followed Pitrelli’s career, says to this day, that some of Pitrelli’s best leads ever came from Blackwood & Foti.

It was there... that I finally got a chance to write a few progressive like rock tunes... like Haunted Memories and The Old Man. Haunted Memories was the first song to use the broken Am chording I would again use in things like Dusk and the “Slow Burn” section of the Awakening. There is actually a very hard version of Dusk on “Big Pussy” Vinny Pastore’s (The  Soprano’s) soundtrack LP, Growing Down in Brooklyn, along  with a somewhat  progressive 70’s vamp which was the theme song to that movie which I did the score to.

So, yes, I have a history in the louder side of Rock and Roll (.. but nothing draws me in more than haunting music... those creepy 12 string guitar moments by Genesis... “Six saintly shrouded men”, that passage before The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man, and those dark moments of Cinema Show. Going Under by Marillion, Bells for Her by Tori Amos, Long Long Long by the Beatles, the Halloween inspired Empty Cages by Dan Fogelberg, the Dreaming Tree by DMB...I mean... really... that’s what draws me in. Listen to Entangled by Genesis during Halloween and you will understand who I am...

The project has clearly moved on a great deal from an initial two person collaboration. From listening to the album, I get the impression that this was required in order to bring ideas to their natural sound and conclusion. Is that correct?

I’m not so sure that this is correct. The entire album was written, played upon (except for special guests), engineered and produced by just the two of us. There are some really great guest appearances on this record, but those came after the album was already “completed”. Once we were ready for mixdown, Mark and H and Rothers and some fantastic Drum work by Ian... that all happened once our ideas had been fully completed and the album was at pre-mixdown stage.

There is an entire drum track, for instance, that Pete had written for The Awakening that is all there and is really quite terrific. The thing was that if you can get Ian Mosley to play drums on a track... well, then you certainly take that opportunity.  But there was something special about the fact that we got to have the album, turn out exactly as it was in our heads, because we wrote every guitar, keyboard and drum line ourselves (except for the Special Guest sections). Pete Trewavas is a really quite a good arranger, I have to say. He does quite a bit of the arranging for Marillion, in fact, and he is responsible for many of Marillion’s songs coming out in the final wash as they do.

My father had an old piano that I used to love playing... and one of the things that I used to do was to play a set of chords a certain way... and then play those same chords in a completely different way, and make it sound brighter, and then sadder, then “scary”, maybe... My father was a jazz player and I grew up listening to all kinds of great music, like Duke Ellington and it was great to hear growing up all these influences. So I loved to try different arrangements of the same song.

I think you have to realize too, that there are parts of this album where you may wonder why did they use a synthetic drum instead of an actual drummer?... and why didn’t they get an actual engineer, but you have to realize that Pete has been in bands his entire life. I mean, yes, he’s been in many projects outside of Marillion, such as Kino, Transatlantic, and even The Wishing Tree, but realize that it’s always a “band scenario”. For the first time, Pete got to play the guitar himself when he was inspired by something or the keyboards... not that he doesn’t play the guitar in Marillion sometimes, but here it was full creative control to do everything the way we wanted it to be, without having to show it to four other people and then have then approve it or improve it or disprove it. It was a chance to just create and make the drums exactly what we wanted and the keys exactly what we wanted…

and even have the spaces between the songs exactly as long as we wanted and the guitars as loud or quiet and the entire process... was what we came up with. And then.... we had some guest appearances to take yet someplace else, but the album was basically complete by then, except for the fact that for Spiraling I had to write a whole new section just for Steve Rothery’s part (which came out awesome by the way). It was just very cool to just do it and be creative and whatever came to mind is what you hear.

Onto the album. It is a Marillion question first. I think this is the first time that the band have all been involved in a non-band project. How did you persuade them all, and were they “willing” participants?

Well they are all good mates really, and after 30 years of working with them and appearing on a lot of their albums like Steve Rothery’s “The Wishing Tree” and in the live version of the H Band for awhile, I got to play with some really great players... well they all said yes, so I guess that was all good (plus he was holding a rather large firearm at the time!). A lot of it was Eric’s idea, really. Eric has been a part of helping the band in many ways in North America for a lot of years, driving the band back and forth to the gigs, and getting them all safely to their beds at night, and back to the gigs every morning, and I think he has a pretty good relationship with all of them and didn’t want any of them to feel “left out”... like it was suddenly all about “me” and not about any of them, who he felt close to as well.

I have been responsible as part of a team evaluating the band for inclusion on our site. In our discussions, I described “In The Last Waking Moments” as constituting a smorgasbord of classic prog music, with heavy, and eclectic elements, but, overall, being an album that marks an important evolution in the neo-prog sound and movement. A fair comment?

If it’s a cheese smorgasbord... featuring various cheddars and stilton’s and goudas. Pete loves a good cheese buffet.

Yes... plenty of cheese...! Well I think we tried to do lots of different types of music on here, but I think the album sort of led us to do different things in different places. Like sometimes it just felt that things needed to be heavier in certain places and at times more straight forwards, and at times more proggy. In the end it wound up being a combination of Eric and my own styles meshing together and a few things that I think inspired me musically that hopefully people will come back and visit... like bands such as PFM, which was an inspiration to me that maybe after listening to this record, people will go back and want to hear more of, and Caravan “In The Land of the Grey and Pink”, and Chris Squire. Eric meanwhile brings a heavier influence at times. He likes to get loud, play loud... as the neighbours and the people who live down the block and the lady walking her dog around the corner and the police will testify.

If what you’re saying means that there is an evolution to the fact that prog music shouldn’t just be tied in to specific “un-yielding” sets of rules than I agree with that statement. The problem that I have with “prog” sometimes, and its label, is that it can get too pretentious about how things have to fit in a specific line and can’t deviate... that being a “a crazy sort of line” with syncopation and bizarre keys and tunings but it “HAS” to be that. I’m not much of a conformist and I don’t believe in trying to write just to be clever, because that can sometimes lead to some very droll music. I would rather write to what feels natural at the time, and just have it sound good. If we have done one thing that I am proud of on this record, it is bringing many different influences to the table in one album, so that it can expand one’s thoughts about music... maybe get someone who is too neo-prog set in his ways to appreciate something like “The Other Other Dimension”,  and maybe a true progger who came to hear that song to think well... I like how Spiraling just sort of floats along and doesn’t have to have any “purpose” other than setting a tone or a state of being in your head. It doesn’t have to have a thousand chords and key changes... but it has to sound “good”... that it is perfectly fine being what it is. If you can “get” that, and not over complicate it, “See the Forest before the Trees” as it were, then I think there’s a lot of really “juicy” stuff to find in here.

There are some wonderfully heavy riffs on the album, in addition to some beautiful, moving passages. Please provide our readers with a synopsis of the writing process that created these sounds.

Eric does come from a much harder background than I do, and I love listening to those great old rock tunes like Sabbath. I love loud Rock and Roll... I really do, but I’m not very good at writing them. Eric however can rip a really good riff and make it sound really good where I ... well it sounds more like a proggy guy trying to be “loud”. It is truly difficult to write a good hard rock song and make it sound “cool”, and Eric did some great heavy riffs on this record that I wish I had the ability to write.

Yeah, but as is the case with these things  (and you and I sharing ideas and influences), you were the one that wrote Outerspaced .That’s your riff, not mine. I had felt that we could use another heavy “Pete Trewavas” bass driven track that was like The “Other” Other Dimension, but perhaps more accessible that could even be a radio track. You took all that in and wrote an awesome heavy bass riff there... that undoubtedly woke the neighbours and set off car alarms, and even inspired an earthquake, because as I remember right in the middle of you singing “Outerspaced”, a 6.0 earthquake came in and made the entire house roll!... causing a potted plant to fall over... and a guitar stand... and me... It is sort of the way we write together. I come up with ideas but you’ll use some of those ideas and make them your own and run in a completely different direction with them, and I will be inspired by something you do and it will cause me to write something I normally wouldn’t.  We sort of feed off each other in a very parasitic sort of way (laughs)

The Awakening can only be described as an epic track, and I understand it was amongst the last to be created on the album. Was it a deliberate choice to include a fifteen minute plus epic, or just a natural process in creating the album?

I woke up and I came downstairs and Pete was messing about on my Martin Guitar. I really love writing on Eric’s Martin... it is just such a beautiful instrument to play and quite inspiring really... and Pete was just jangling away on those chords and he said, hey what do you think of this? I have to be honest with you, I wasn’t sure that you could take what we had at that point which was basically two chords... and make it become something more than about six minutes long, but as we began to produce it and add the strings and everything to it, it just kept growing and growing.

I had always felt that this song could have been something that would have fit somewhere on Trick of the Tail by Genesis, so to be completely honest... we originally named the Awakening, “Squonkie”... and Squonkie just seemed like he wanted to be really big. He kept growing and growing, and, at first, you wouldn’t expect these few chords to become something as big as it was, but when Eric began putting the lyrics in, it started to get bigger and then the lead guitars were placed, it again got bigger.

Squonkie just seemed like he wanted to be the centre of attention and soon he was!

Then we began to discuss putting strings on, and Eric came up with... why don’t we put in a sort of a ba-da-ba-da-bamp bump bahhh (singing), into it, and that seemed to want to be heard for a bit as well, Then I came up with this “town choir” idea at the end, where we had a whole bunch of people singing “This is it, the Awakening Hour”, and then Eric thought about putting the original lyrics back in on top of people singing that, and suddenly it was even bigger. Eric had said in the beginning when I first started playing it... that there was the possibility that this could be one of “those songs”, but I don’t know if I ever thought it would come in at close to sixteen minutes. Still it seemed like the album was going someplace and needed to have a sort of conclusion. I think that The Awakening does actually take us there in its natural progression to a “finale” so to speak... and I think that “Squonkie” sort of told us what to do. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to be huge and get plenty of attention and that’s exactly what happened.

The Awakening finished up at nearly 180 tracks if I’m not mistaken, and Mike Hunter actually had to reboot the computers at the Racket Club quite a few times. Keep in mind that these are the same computers that produced things like the Invisible Man, Ocean Cloud, and The Awakening was the song that nearly brought it down. I think that’s rather funny considering we’re a “duet act”. 180 tracks from a duo. Though, to be honest, we did bring quite a bit of wonderful players to help us with this track after we had finished writing and recording it, including Ian Mosley, who did some really signature Ian style drums on this, and really drove the track beautifully, and Steve Hogarth joined up with Mark Kelly and Andy Ditchfield to do the big “town choir” ending.

The song did change quite a bit, however, from where it started. We originally had a different song in the middle called “The Longing”, that was there until the very end of the recording process. We pulled that song out and put “Slow Burn” which is an old song of Eric’s that he sort of re-created in Ocean City Maryland to match where this song was heading. We put it in and it was like it had always just belonged there. The fact is, however, that this song didn’t come at the end of the writing process, but closer to the beginning, because we had already finished writing it before we went to the gig in Montreal (the Marillion Montreal convention). We had rented a lovely chalet up in Mont Saint Sauveur, Quebec, and I had come quite a bit ahead of time to spend ten days writing and recording this album before the convention.

Yeah,  I believe you had come up with the majority of the chord progression for The Awakening on the fourth day of our stay at “Le Chateau de Mont Saint Sauveur” (laughs)...

Right, and you had actually written the lead part at the Olympia Theatre after a gig the night of Mark Kelly’s 50^th Birthday Party...the second night of the Convention.  

I had taken all the boys back to their hotels, and once they were all snugly in their beds, I didn’t want to drive all the back to Mont Saint Sauveur. Too many of Rothery’s Blue Drinks! So I stayed backstage on the couch with Wendy at the theatre. I got up in the middle of the night, and roamed about and went on stage and saw H’s pick on his mic stand that he had used from that night’s performance. I swiped it... went backstage and finally finished off the final lead guitar of “The Awakening”.

Right, because... you had been messing about with that that guitar part for nearly a week now, unsuccessfully, and was... Now  Now! No need to mention any of that! So there it was... It all came together as I summoned the intensity of the Steve “h” Guitar Pick. He’s not getting any points because of that, either!

I think our readers would really love to have a “behind the lyrics” explanation of the concept of the “Other” Other Dimension. Where on earth, for example, did the idea of the doctors performing the surgeries come from?

Well I have to say that I probably needed to be a bit “coaxed” into it a bit. I was like hmm... I’m nor really sure about this Eric...

If I tell you how many times I heard ... “Are You Sure?” (said with very Cockney British accent), coming out of his mouth as he read back the doctors concept. See he wants to blame me for all of it... but he really wanted to do it. He is just so proper “British” that he wanted the American to take the fall for all the insanity that was about to begin.

No, really I loved the way it came out, I mean... I think we needed to do something a little out there, and it certainly did that. We had done so much heavier Alternative Rock and Pink Floyd’y influences up until now, and I think the “Other” Other Dimension pays homage a bit more to Gentle Giant perhaps.

Yeah, I was thinking that this was sort of close to a Pete Trewavas “solo” album with just the two of us ... and there needed to be something a little more “Pete Trewavas” about it. There needed to be a truly syncopated bass driven song that people would want from a Pete Trewavas album, which up until this point wasn’t quite there yet. Pete immediately came up with the main motif (as it were...) on the bass and the different changes came pretty quickly after that. The lyrics were sort of inspired by the rather insane bass line and keyboards that Pete had been laying down, so it is all your fault actually.

There is actually a very good reason for “The Doctors” and why it is there... it is really all part of the story, and where it had progressed to by this point, but I think we would like it if our listeners could tell us what it means. Why it is there... and why does it suddenly break into Spiraling... and then back again. Sometimes it’s really great to hear the listeners and the fans tell you their ideas of why something is the way it is. I mean, a lot of it was messing about and having some fun, but I think there are some very deliberate things on this album... why things are the way they are, and why the album flows as it does, and why certain things are produced the way they are, and others seem far less produced... like “Lifeline”,  Across The Plains (A true homage paid to PFM if I am to be honest). I think this song, however, really pays homage to Gentle Giant’s “In A Glass House” Album which... well a lot of you probably know about already, but if you don’t you should check it out as it is a fantastic record. I really would love to tell you what is going on here, and in time we will... but I think it is something I would rather you figure why Eric and I wrote it the way we did... what Eric’s lyrics actually mean, and why we are at this stage in the album. I will say, however, we had a hell of a lot fun writing this...

For obvious reasons, I think the album will deeply appeal to many loyal Marillion fans the world over, especially those, like me, who adore the Hogarth era of the band. However, I do not think that this is the end of its appeal, and many fans of what I call classic rock (the likes of Rainbow, Deep Purple & etc.) and some of the spacier and eclectic sides of prog will find much to appreciate here. Again, is this a fair summation?

I think we tried very hard not to write an album that is easy to “classify”. I love all kinds of music, from jazz to great old classic rock, and Eric brought in all sorts of other influences as well. I hope we were able to do something different and exciting, but give people a chance to just enjoy music. Not necessarily prog but definitely prog, and not necessarily Hard Rock, but it is certainly there and that it could appeal to a wide array of people. As I said before, you would be surprised how much I like some of the great hard rock bands of the 70’s like Sabbath, and we had just got off a really good tour with Deep Purple last year.

Ahh, Rainbow... see, now you’re hitting a nerve here...... Dio screaming out Stargazer... wow... does it get any more intense than that? But again... you see Long Live Rock and Roll and a song like Rainbow Eyes on the same record. That’s the kind of thing we are trying to bring back... that music needs to be hit on all levels to create the perfect album ... and all those levels need to really be sound musically... being that you want to hear them. We really tried to do that... consciously... though this album really did sort of lead us around in different directions by itself... but I think because of this, people who love that classic Rock sound from the 70’s, may find some of this quite appealing.

Are there any plans to take this project onto the road?

Well, the problems are that taking something on the road means getting a band together, paying that band, and making it happen. Just because an album does well doesn’t mean that it will draw enough of a fan base to make it viable as a live thing. Even Transatlantic’s first concerts weren’t very well attended at all. It took a bit of time to get that to the point it has reached. That said, Eric and I didn’t begin picking up guitars and keyboards and basses to play to ourselves. We did it to play live in front of actual people. I think we would love to do this live, but we would need to see a level of commitment by fans that they would actually come to a gig for us to actually do it. We would need a really good band as well where Eric and I could do our “thing” and not have to play every instrument ourselves on stage with a drum machine, as I think that would be rather a sad thing to watch!

Actually, I would like a band to play all the music and we could sit there in balcony, and just watch them and eat popcorn. Right, and if we don’t like them... we could just throw the popcorn at them... and pick off the Children of Edison one by one. Maybe even keep pumpkins with us for the ones we really don’t like... we’re gonna need a lot of children so we can keep plucking them off. No, really, um... I think the thing is.... if the fans really show a level of loyalty to the point that a live show of this album becomes a viable thing... than really what I’m saying is... it’s really all up to you. If you want it to happen strongly enough, then it will happen. If there is that much of a buzz about us that we can’t ignore it anymore, and a tour would be strong enough that we could actually do it, then... we will do it. But it is entirely up to you, the listeners...  show us that it is truly something you want. Tell the world... make it exciting... if Edison’s Children grows and grows then we certainly would consider touring and making this a regular thing.

Commercially, it is really important that projects such as this do not suffer from illegal downloading and other forms of piracy. What message do you have for people tempted to indulge in such forms of obtaining your work?

I think people would be shocked how much this record actually cost to make. Mixing, mastering, finding nice inspiring places to write this and make it come out like it did, getting the artwork sorted, getting the record done. I mean... the actual real honest tax receipts alone are in the tens of thousands. It costs an absolute fortune to make an album... and the amount of money spent on all sorts of things that you don’t budget for because you wouldn’t expect it, are just endless.

In the end, I would tell people who illegally download this album and love what we’ve done... well you may have just stopped this kind of thing from ever happening again. We are career musicians, which means we make our money on making records and the public buying them. If you stop that from happening then we simply can’t afford to do it again. It will take years to actually make any money off this record and those who illegally download ... well, we’re not Lady Gaga or Metallica and we’re not some big corporation. You’re not hurting Wal-mart here. You’re hurting those little bands that count on your support to continue on. A small group of people whom you actually want to continue to see make new records! Who are trying to make a living doing this for you, and dependent on your fairness and morality.  If you break that chain by getting your music for free or posting it for others to get for free, there is a very, very good chance that this may never happen again because we simply can’t afford to do it anymore

Lets face it, you can buy this record from Racket Records or iTunes as a download for $9.99 (even cheaper for those outside of Europe). You probably have spent more on eating a cheeseburger this week... or more money on a pack of cigarettes. It’s not a lot of money to ask for something that will last a lot longer than that cheeseburger or pack of cigarettes. Meanwhile that $10 and another person’s $10 adds up... and may become enough to allow a tour and / or a new album to happen again. Like I said, we’re a small band here, you’re $9.99 for a band this small, really does make a huge bit of difference.  (And let’s face it, you’ll still afford to buy that cheeseburger)

What does the future hold for Edison’s Children?

Again, I think it is all up to the fans. If they show a loyalty and excitement that makes us say... well that was truly successful, it will be natural for it to happen again and again... I have to say that everyone’s response thus far has been fantastic. So honestly... keep pushing for the radio stations to play it often and loud! Keep talking about it on the forums, and on your Facebook pages, just the way you have been so far. Spread the word. People have to know that it exists first... in order for them to want to hear it.

We are the musicians... but it is you that creates the buzz that can take this to the next level... and if you buzz loud enough then we will certainly do this again.

To close, thank you both very much again. Is there anything else you wish to add for our readers?

Thank you for taking the time to read what we’ve got to say. Thanks for everyone who has been coming up to me at all the Marillion concerts to say good things about us, for wearing your Edison’s Children T-Shirts proudly, and all of you who have been writing about us in the various forums. Eric does keep me alerted as to what is being said (he is the computer savvy nerd of the group, so he is aware of what is being said on the net) and he sends me all of your comments that he finds, so we do both know what you all are saying about us to everyone. Thank you very much

If you’re interested please check us out, download the album, and help us to keep the thing going for a long time to come.

Edison’s Children website is at:

http://www.edisonschildren.com

Their Facebook page is at:

http://www.facebook.com/edisonschildren

You can buy the album from Racket records, at:

http://www.marillion.com/music/solo/waking.htm

Their PA page is at:

http://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=6967

My grateful thanks to Eric & Pete for their considerable time in providing such a detailed and extensive interview for the site.