Saturday night was End of the World Night on one TV channel here in the UK. It was a semi light-hearted look at Armageddon and the most likely possible causes of global meltdown and the end of the world as we know it.
Several academics put forward their respective theories on how civilisation is most likely to end with a different film to depict each possible cause of the Apocalypse. The conclusion was that although we are pretty nervous about pandemics, alien and zombie invasions, extreme changes in climate, erupting volcanoes and perish the thought, an asteroid entering our airspace, the overriding Number One fear is still the threat of nuclear war. Cue a few well-chosen scenes from the classic Stanley Kubrick political satire “Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb” to further illustrate the point.
This dovetailed nicely with an album which I have had on almost constant play in the Progmobile for the past couple of weeks, which may have escaped some people’s attention when it was released in February.
“Heavy On The Beach” is the debut album from Grand Tour, an amalgamation of two of Scotland’s finest prog exports, Abel Ganz and Comedy of Errors.
The album is the brainchild of Hew Montgomery, the former Abel Ganz keyboards player and composer, who has held a long time fascination with the Cold War years and the resultant stand-off between the superpowers during this tense period. The album’s title indirectly comes from Nevil Shute’s book “On The Beach” depicting nuclear war and its aftermath, that was turned into a 1959 film starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.
As the book and film show, there are ramifications far beyond the theatre of war itself and how the shockwaves reverberate -literally – around the world so that the only habitable parts of the earth are in the southern hemisphere until the inhabitants are doomed when threatened with creeping radiation sickness.
It’s a bleak and foreboding scenario on which to base a whole “concept” album such as this especially as the whole musical journey is set in just the one location, the beach. But in keeping with other Armageddon-themed films, the beach is a natural place from where to watch the distant atomic mushroom cloud erupt over the endless sea.
Hew had been developing the material for this album over a period of 30 years and he deliberately bases it on the classic prog keyboard sounds of Hammond organ, Mellotron, Moog leads and Rhodes piano. To this, he has added, along with his own basslines, the searing guitar runs of Mark Spalding, the precision drumming of Bruce Levick and the distinctive pure voice of Joe Cairney, three compadres from Comedy of Errors,
An eerie wind and apocalyptic grand organ begins the album, during which Cairney is your narrator and guide to the scene he surveys down on the beach. From there, the eight tracks take you on a journey exploring the subsequent landscape following the detonation of Robert Oppenheimer’s deadly toy. It is a beautifully balanced and absorbing album which never loses its shape or momentum. It ebbs and flows like the tides lapping on the beach, the compositions all giving a slightly different perspective to the nightmare scenes of oblivion and abandonment they are depicting.
This also includes a reminder of Little Boy and the Fat Man, the names of the uranium and plutonium fusion bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively which effectively brought World War 2 to a cataclysmic end.
However, one of the most spine-tingling moment is when Cairney cries out during the final track The Grand Tour (Part 2):
“Save me, take my soul,
Save my children, not my home.
God, can you hear me, or am I alone?
Save me, take my soul.”
It is though all hope is lost to the madness of those who choose to play the highest of stakes with millions of innocent lives.
Hew also mentions that Grand Tour will always be a “Big Big Train” kind of venture, in that it is a studio based project with no plans to present live gigs. However, as both bands share the same sound engineer Rob Aubrey and Big Big Train do have two sell-out live concerts in August this year, never say never!
For now, here is an album which is likely to be right up there with the best of the best at the end of 2015.
If you have missed it so far, find out more here: http://grandtourmusic.org/
Progarchy 