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Ken Elliott Interview by Fraser Massey |
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It started as a joke. It was a sort of flippant, throwaway title. When Ken Elliott finished the penultimate track on what was to be Seventh Wave's debut album "Things to Come" with it's hauntingly, stirring, pumping rhythms and its cataclysmic crashing end, he was lost for something to call it. "I wanted the title of the tune to have something to do with Armageddon and also the rebirth of life afterwards, because I didn't believe the world would ever end totally" he recalls. CND was very big in the 60's and we'd all grown up listening to anti-war protests. So the idea of an atomic war was in the forefront of our minds. We'd looked at all the prophecies and mysticism and things that were going around at the time and had come to the conclusion that 1999 was generally accepted as what was going to be the year of Armageddon". "But I thought calling the track 1999 would be a bit clichéd, and anyway, the music on it didn't sound portentous enough to be saddled with a title like 1999. So without giving it too much thought I rather off-handedley called it 19991/2 instead". "Interestingly though, when I later re-read Nostradamus I discovered that he predicted that the apocalypse would happen in July or August - which would of course make it half-way through 1999. "In those days everybody was so much into some form of mysticism - like astrology, tarot, I-Ching or prophecies - that I think people quite genuinely accepted that somewhere like London could be blown off the face of the Earth by the summer of 1999. Of course, as we approach that date, I'm not so sure myself". One thing that Ken was sure about when the album was recorded in 1974 was that there wasn't going to be much of a future for Seventh Wave. Ken and percussionist Kieran O'Connor had been together in the psychedelic cult heroes "Second Hand" who put out three albums in the late '60's and early '70's - "Reality" on Polydor in 1968, "Death May Be Your Santa Claus" on Mushroom in 1971 (now available on CD with additional bonus tracks on See For Miles SEECD 479) and a third album Chillum, for reasons nobody can now remember recorded under the band name "Chillum", again for Mushroom in 1971 (and also now available on CD with additional bonus tracks on See For Miles SEECD 491). Although all of those albums have subsequently become major collectors items, the record buying public of the time criminally neglected them. Disillusioned by a lack of commercial success and constantly bickering among themselves, Ken and Kieran fell out and split up Second Hand. "But Kieran and I were like the terrible twins", says Ken. "We couldn't keep away from each other. We shared all the same friends. So socially, after we split up, we'd still keep meeting and bumping into each other". "Glen Cornick from Jethro Tull had a pub in Streatham in south London and a lot of musicians used to go there at the time. The place was always full of girls in Biba gear and long-haired guys in flares". "And it was in there one night that Kieran and I got talking. There was no way that I wanted to be in a band with him ever again after the experiences of Second Hand. Creatively he was brilliant, but he always wanted to rock the boat. I just knew working with him would not be an enjoyable experience". "But he suggested that we do an album with just synth and drums. No band, no rehearsals, no touring afterwards. Just go and do it. And those sessions were to become the first Seventh Wave album "Things To Come". Ken had such small expectations for the project that he thought he and Kieran might just have to put the thing out themselves. Instead by the time he'd run into Kieran again in that Streatham south London pub, he'd settled into a perfectly satisfying and lucrative career as a studio session player and composer, specialising in advertising jingles for things like Lego toys and Chiquita bananas and in creating incidental TV music such as the theme to ITN's News At One. "It was great. I was making more money than I'd ever had in my life and I'd gotten away from all the arguments you get as part of life on the road in a band". But the buzz around the record industry caused by the tapes was to put a stop to all that. The mass success of Virgin Records debut release, Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield, created a huge demand for synthesiser based concept albums. Every label wanted to find a Mike Oldfield of their own. Both Gull Records in Britain and Janus in the States thought they had found theirs in Kieran and Ken. Janus in particular were much taken by the music of Things To Come. In their publicity campaign across the States for the album, they proudly trumpeted: "Two men from Britain sound like twenty". That's the unique quality of composer Ken Elliott's debut album Things To Come. Behind his electronic keyboard is percussionist Kieran O'Connor. It's the new sound synthesizing with man's oldest sound, creating an electronic charge that turns you on to current things: Like a city sitting in judgement of it's loneliness; like love knocking on a deaf man's door. This is Things to Come. If it sounds like the here and now, it's because Seventh Wave has touched your shore". Here in Britain and across continental Europe a lot of people were of course aware that Things To Come was far from being Ken's debut release. It was, to all intents and purposes, the long awaited fourth Second Hand album. But by this time Ken and Kieran had jettisoned the Second Hand name. They'd opted to call themselves "Seventh Wave". Henri Charriere's prison escape novel Papillon, also made into a film staring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, were very popular at the time. In the story Papillon had made his escape from his remote island jail by waiting for the seventh wave to sweep him away because the seventh one was always the biggest wave in the sea. Ken was perfectly happy to tell anyone who asked that Papillon was the inspiration for his adopting the Seventh Wave name for the band. "I'd even gone as far as standing on a sea shore and counting the waves to check out whether it was true," he says. Things To Come become a massive hit on American radio, turning into a regular fixture of the FM radio play charts. But the radio success failed to convert into sales. When the American tour that should have been the making of Seventh Wave finally did take place, the inevitable had already happened. Ken and Kieran had fallen out again and Kieran had quit the band. The American drummer "Stretch", later to find fame as part of Roger Chapman's backing band, filled in instead for the tour. Ken himself packed in the band in 1976, at the end of the trek across the States. The two Seventh Wave albums, collected here together for the first time on CD, mark the complete output of the band. There was a single - Manifestations -, described at the time of its release by James Hamilton in Record Mirror and Disc as "totally overwhelming, decidedly oddball, but extremely exciting if played loud". And it's the single version rather than the album track that we've included here. By 1999 Ken Elliott had returned to music and could be heard performing on the theme to the ITV hit drama "Wonderful You". In the spring, as we were preparing to release this compilation, he was considering a trip to Ireland to visit former Second Hand bassist George Hart. Adapted from an interview by Fraser Massey for the CD compilation of "Things to Come" and "Psi Fi" |