British Progressive Rock band PENDRAGON around founder, guitarist and singer Nick Barrett will be able to celebrate their 30th anniversary next year. This summer, twenty years after their first full-length-album The Jewel, they re-released just this and published their seventh album Believe.
Having such a long (band-) history, there are countless good, less good and bad stories to tell and there are many questions to be answered. Nick Barrett did this in his very honest, thoughtful and friendly way (which also is characteristic for his music) quite detailed...

Isabel: Just recently the latest PENDRAGON-record Believe was released. The title is a very strong one and is not seldom used in musical and artistic context. What does the word believe mean to you the most?
Nick: The album is about NOT believing everything you read in the press or see on TV. We accept all these things so readily, and what I am saying is be curious, ask questions!

Isabel: Regarding the record’s content: is it about a possible wish of yours that people believe in you and your thoughts and findings and music? Or is it that you wish to believe? Or is it about the fact that you found something to believe in? (a very detailed description about the content of the album can be found on the band-page)
Nick: Naahhh... I'm not asking to believe in me! That would be a bit pretentious I think! The idea came about from some books I read by David Icke about conspiracy theories, the government setting us up to think that we are 'always doing the right thing' but we are being manipulated into a new world order and the human race eventually into slavery. Believe what you are told at you peril, I am talking about everything from being taken over by religious belief systems through to what we are told by the US government about the reasons for going to war with Iraq!

Isabel: Believe puts an emphasis on guitar dominated music (which I personally like a lot). The keyboards are left a bit more in the background, which means quite a change in the music of PENDRAGON. Can you explain the reason for this change?
Nick: Well a lot of the music was written on guitar and I didn't want to swamp the guitar tone on this album, I wanted to give it more 'air' to breathe, and get away from the thick layers of keyboards. We have used that Moog triplet sound so much on the other albums; I felt it was time to move on. There are masses of keyboards on Believe but they are things like samples.

Isabel: Is there a possibility that we will be able to enjoy even harder riffing and/or electric guitar solos? Frankly spoken: will PENDRAGON get a touch of metal sometime?
Nick: Only in places! I really got into a lot of the Nu Metal acts and bands like Jurassic 5, Tract and The Lost Prophets, I like this grungy kind of sound but it's also very progressive as well, bands like Riverside from Poland and a new band from the UK called Pure Reason Revolution. I heard a lot of new music from some motocross videos my son had and really liked the youthful new energy of these bands and was really inspired to get some of this energy in our stuff too.
I would say that we would add metal stuff as an addition... but no way as a replacement!

Isabel: How much and in which way are the other band members involved in the development of the music?
Nick: Not at all. Basically it became the way that I wrote for PENDRAGON and that's the way it's stayed! Everyone has the opportunity to write if they want but it doesn't really ever happen. Where the other band members come into action is their performances on the records, that is when they lay down their personalities that makes it a PENDRAGON album and not just a Nick Barrett solo record. Also live, the other band members are obviously crucial to what we are on stage.

Isabel: PENDRAGON is a quite strange name with a wonderful sound to it. The one who knows about its origin would expect the band to “be” in some way medieval. But I’d rather say that it has not much to do with legends about kings and dragons. Is there a reason why you chose this name?
Nick: Yeah... our first drummer Nigel Harris thought of it sooooo long ago! At the time the name seemed to fit, like the name Pink Floyd probably fitted with their psychedelic music of the time, it has become just a 'word' now, like the band The Police, after a while the implications of the name fall away. We actually never sung about kings and dragons as such, most of the lyrics were about philosophies, theology and psychology, or political.

Isabel: Reading the history of the band I got the information that especially the album Not Of This World was strongly inspired by your own personal experiences and feelings. Can this be generalized for your music and lyrics?
Nick: Yes. I suppose we write from our experiences and the more real they are, the more real the music will be. I got divorced in 1990, and went through an awful period and this is what the subject of Not Of This World was about. To date, that was probably our most real and emotional album. Some people just found it too dark. But through expressing unhappiness in sad ways in music, you purge your soul of the pain.

Isabel: The influences of some well-known bands are clearly to hear in the music of PENDRAGON. I personally like the way you develop these first progressive ideas and mend them with your very own style. But there are people who accuse you of being too close to the original or even nicking ideas. What do you feel when hearing something like that and what do you want to say about such statements?
Nick: Show me a band that doesn't!!!!!
Every single solitary band nowadays cannot claim to be original; they just rehash the sound of other bands and present the music in a different way. OK, that's not necessarily a BAD thing, it’s just the way it is, and as long as SOME people are getting something from it, it is valid. People said that Marillion sounded like Genesis rip offs, well they may have sounded a bit like Genesis, but the hundreds of thousands of people who went to see them and buy their records were not wrong!!!!!!!!!!!! Marillion 'came from somewhere' so did Bob Dylan, so did Madonna, so did Pink Floyd... let's be realistic.

Isabel: Where else then in bands like Pink Floyd, Camel etc. do you find inspiration?
Nick: Well I like Pink Floyd and Camel, but Genesis were really my band, they are the ones, particularly the songs of Tony Banks that really tipped me over the edge! Apart from these I don't listen to a lot of progressive music, we also have a lot of other influences from bands I like, for example Queen, Pat Metheny, The Who, Sade, classical music, Al Di Meola, UFO, there are too many to mention.

Isabel: PENDRAGON’s music has very different influences. One of them is Marillion. As I read PENDRAGON used to have a quite close relationship to this band. Are you still in contact?
Nick: I haven't seen them for ages, I saw Mark a few years a go in Rotherham at a gig, and Pete ...er somewhere...at the bar I think! I haven't seen Steve Rothery for a long time, we used to always talk guitars and riffs and amps, it was great, we jammed once a bit in the studio where they were recording Script Of A Jester’s Tear in London. I never really knew Steve Hogarth and I heard from Fish a few years ago. Yes it was great working with them in the 80's. When Mick Pointer was in the band, I think he really championed PENDRAGON and I will always recognise Mick's efforts to get us as the support act for them.

Isabel: Regarding relationships with other musicians: especially the musicians of the “Progressive Rock scene” seem to have a close connection to each other all over the world. How can PENDRAGON be seen in this context?
Nick: Well, obviously Clive had about a million projects that he is working on, so he is very visible in the Prog scene. Peter works on his solo stuff and gets quite a few Prog musicians in on his albums. Fudge also plays sessions with Tim Burness and La Host.

Isabel: Are you in contact with this “scene”?
Nick: Yes... a bit. Sometimes I suppose I am away from it, as the last four years, when I was 'on a journey', but I keep in touch with some of the guys, I know Martin from IQ well and see some of the Pallas guys now and again. John Jowitt obviously... everyone knows John, and the Arena and Jadis guys, come to think of it ...that's most of them isn't it?

Isabel: Is there a “young” Progressive Rock band you especially appreciate? And why?
Nick: There are a few, some of the more grungy Prog bands I think are where it is at today, bands like Riverside from Poland, their last album Out Of Myself is really good, also a new band from the UK, Pure Reason Revolution who I actually went to see in Bath last night, I met their A+R guy from Sony records on Holiday in Lanzarote and he told me about them and lent me a CDR, they are really good.

Isabel: PENDRAGON have had difficulties in the past to be commercially successful with their records. Has there been a change?
Nick: Nope. It's got even harder!! Now because people download and burn CD’s we get even less sales and less income it is hard to keep going financially, I had to sell my road motorbike to pay for the recording of the drums and mixing for Believe. I know the 'computer culture' is 'so what'...but I tell you if people do not respect the musician’s livelihood, so the bands will not be able to afford to make albums and tour or do decent shows. How many of your readers would go to work and not get paid, and be happy with that?? Please don't download our music, if you want it … buy the CD’s!!!!!

Isabel: Since when are you working together with InsideOut music? How did it come to this connection?
Nick: I knew Thomas and Michael from the days when they ran the IQ fan club in Germany called Magic Roundabout. So, it was inevitable that when they started their record label we would work with them in Germany, we had no big distribution until then. I guess we started working with Inside Out around 1990.

Isabel: What influence on promotion and success does collaboration like this have?
Nick: It is a necessity, without promotion you cannot reach people, so how can you sell any records? It is all self perpetuating, you need the promotion, to sell the records, to get the audiences in for concerts, and so it goes on... Obviously working with a company that has already a track record with journalists and the media means they have a good chance of getting good promotion for the bands they work with.

Isabel: Thinking of the fact that there isn’t a record published every year or every second year, I am wondering if you can make enough money with the releases and tours. Can you make a living out of your music nowadays?
Nick: It is a real struggle; I have been living off the money I made on my house sale and reportage for the last few years, with very little actual income form music at all. So obviously when we put out a new album, there is again a lot of debt to clear before you can say I have earned this from the new album. You can make a living of music, but just about, you have to make more records which mean your creative output is under pressure, and sometimes that can mean not very good rushed albums! This is another problem that downloading and free music has created. Some musicians may have to make more albums and hence a lesser quality just to survive.

Isabel: If not, I would be very interested in what you and the other band members are doing to earn money?
Nick: As I said I have lived of remortageing my house which means I have borrowed money from the bank against the value of my house, to be honest when I got divorced I had to give half of everything to my ex wife, so I was very nearly bankrupted.
Peter was working with me at Toff Records, but has had to get a daytime job. Fudge has a lot of business interests in property and has done very well with these. Clive obviously has a lot of projects and his studio so manages to keep an income coming in.

Isabel: I am always wondering how musicians manage to live their private lives regarding being on tour, being in studios (which are probably not too close to their hometowns), being not able to take their loved ones with them all the time, etc. It is no secret that you yourself had to suffer a divorce. Did the work for PENDRAGON have a part in it?
Nick: Phew... yes.
I was married to the band! Ha ha.
Really I suppose even though my wife had an affair, it was very much like the Phil Collins way, the wife had the affair, but when you look at the whole thing later on in life, I guess if I hadn't been so intense with PENDRAGON I might still be married, I don't have any regrets, it's the way that life takes you. But since 1978 when PENDRAGON started out I was determined to become a pro musician, it took until 1990 before I could say, yes I can now take some money from the bank to pay my living costs. Between 78 and 90, we have toured constantly, put everything into the band, we rehearsed, did gigs, wrote music, replied to letters from fans, it was total commitment. There were also a lot of disappointments like never getting a major record deal, trying to financially keep going, signing a lot of bad contracts, breaking down in the van in 30cm of snow to go to a gig... man it was hard! So when we started to break through with The World album in 1991, I took our chance we'd been given and put every bit of energy and effort in PENDRAGON, and was hell-bent on making it work. We just couldn't go back now! From then it became more and more successful with each album. Then my marriage problems came along and put us right back to the beginning, so now we are ready to start again...

Isabel: Is a healthy private life one of the reasons why PENDRAGON don’t create so many albums?
Nick: Ha ha... NO!
A very good question though!!
I want to make more records and am very dedicated to the band. After getting divorced many people get into a total spiral downwards, I read the other day about Peter Grant, the Zep manager who never really came back from his divorce and spiralled down into a whirlpool of drugs and depression. For me I got back into surfing and motocross... that did it! But it meant some time away to repair, the problems didn't go away, they kept surfacing in different ways after my divorce which if often the case, I got into a very big depression, had major financial problems it took me 2 years to sell my house, and I was just clocking up a bigger and bigger debt with the bank, I got problems with my ears and sinuses... it just wouldn't end!

Isabel: Is your private life “healthy” nowadays? (You certainly don’t have to answer these very personal questions. It just would make us all happy, if we knew that you are happy *g*)
Nick: I finally moved house last year and have been with a new girlfriend for the past 3 years. As soon as I moved into my new house, I started to write music for Believe. So my path is getting better, we all have these difficult times in our lives, these incredible 'learning' periods, they are like a journey you must make, but that journey must end too...never forget that!
Of course some people just breeze through life with no problems what so ever... like Sting!!! The charmed life I always felt... grrrrr, that guy has got everything, 12 hour sex sessions, loads of cash, a good music career, credibility!!! Gee...and he still sounds sooooo miserable!

Isabel: Which contemporary music are you listening to nowadays? Which bands, solo-artists, genre?
Nick: I like quite a lot of Jazz at some times and Classical at others, at the moment I'm going through a jazz phase... or at least jazzy/soul, I like George Michael's stuff and Sade, for commercial good music, but probably more rock based music at the moment, I never really heard Iron Maiden and I think I might be missing out, I should check this stuff out. I am still curious and inquisitive about music and still have the passion for it, I like a lot of music. I like good songs, and hate 'scientific' music ... music with no feeling or emotion.

Isabel: PENDRAGON is celebrating their 20th anniversary – and exist even longer actually. Are there thoughts or already plans to retire, making the band belong to the past?
Nick: Next year we are thinking about doing a DVD and some shows to celebrate 21st year of The Jewel. We couldn't do 20th year, we didn't have time to organise the gigs this year! I am trying to get all the people who ever played in PENDRAGON involved.

Isabel: Well, hopefully you will take inspiration from Camel in this matter as well: after their “Farewell-tour” they are planning a “Retirement sucks-tour” in 2006.
Nick: Yeah I know!!! We did Camel's freight forwarding for Europe for a few years a while ago, so I know Andy (Andy Latimer, mastermind of Camel) quite well, he always liked playing live and I think would virtually live on tour if he could. I wondered how he would cope with retirement.....now I know!

Isabel: Speaking of touring: is there a chance that we will see you life on tour in the near future?
Nick: Yes we are planning on touring next May and will come to Europe then.

Isabel: Nick, thank you very much for this interview. Best wishes for you and PENDRAGON. We wish to hear a lot more of you in the future. Kind regards.

Nick: Cheers