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by Chris Brough
(This is the first of a series of planned interviews with Allan. Each interview will explore a distinct part of Allan's career and will span nearly 5 decades as a professional musician).
CB: It's been quiet on the Highlander front for some years. The last album with all original tracks was Scotia in 1998. Cool and Smoky in 2000 was a compilation album with only one new track. What have you been up to for the last 12 years? AM: Well I moved the studio from Heidelberg to Schleswig-Holstein. The band was still playing live but it got to the point that rehearsals were difficult to organize because the band members were living 700 km apart. [Colin Jamieson (drums) and Peter Campbell (bass and vocals) were still living in the south of Germany]. Peter eventually moved up north but Colin, although staying a member of the band, said that if we found somebody to take his place we should do so until he was in a position to rejoin.
CB: So Colin is in fact still an official member of the band? AM: Oh yeah but I don't think Colin will ever have the time to play with us again because he is kept pretty busy with a few projects that he has going and I don't think he would ever want to move up here. Anyway the line-up changed a few times over the years. We had two different drummers, two different bassists and two different singers.
CB: At some point Highlander became a four piece... AM: We were a three piece until Peter left but became a four piece because we couldn't find a lead singer who was also a good bass player. Peter was a great musician and was hard to replace either as bassist or vocalist
CB: The last time the band played live was about 3 years ago. What did you get up to then? AM: I concentrated on studio work. Up until the the slump here in Germany the studio was being booked on a regular basis. Some bands would book for a few weeks or a month at a time but for the last year or so it has been mostly weekend work.
CB: Was it at this time that you started giving guitar lessons? AM: Yeah. Well actually I had given lessons for about a year in my Stuttgart time hundreds of years ago!! Teaching guitar is definitely something a musician does when nothing else is happening. As the studio work declined I had to do something. So now I teach guitar from Monday to Thursday and the rest of the time is spent making and recording music - either for customers or more recently for Highlander.
CB: When and why did you decide to reform the band? AM: Last year I got an invitation to visit Wacken Open Air where the band had played in 1992 and 1993 . The atmosphere there made me think what the hell am I doing down here - I should be up there playing! After that weekend I took a weeks holiday to think things over and when I came back I started looking for local musicians for Highlander. I wanted guys from the area so that we wouldn't have the problems with rehearsals - just a phone call and then the guys are here within a half an hour or so. I also got in touch with the Wacken management who promised to give us a gig there this year which gave us more incentive to get things going. They also wanted us to bring out a cd before the festival in August. So I started writing songs in January and towards the end of February we started recording. Things were going really well until we received an email in May informing us that we wouldn't be playing Wacken after all. We had a band meeting and although everyone was disappointed we all felt it was actually a good thing because we wouldn't have to rush to get the album finished and would now have time for all the intricacies. If we had met the deadline the album would have been very raw.
CB: If I remember rightly there was talk about a double album. What became of that idea? AM: Well that was an idea from the Wacken people who wanted us to do a traditional type Scottish album and bring it out as a box set with a re-release of our most successful biker album, which would have been "Harleyluja". However I didn't like the idea and instead decided to write songs that combined both elements.
CB: The working title of the new album is "Inneal Tìme" which is Gaelic for time machine. Why? AM: On the new album a motorbike is the means of travel through Scottish history and as the popular name for a motorbike is "machine" the title Time Machine picked itself. However Time Machine has been used as a song or album title so often. The first song called Time Machine that I remember was by Beggar's Opera (on the album Waters of Change 1971. Their best of cd from 2001 is also called Time Machine). I went through loads of other possibilities – "Time Jumper" and "Time Rider" were contenders but always came back to Time Machine because of the motorbike and as its a Scottish album it got a Scottish name.
CB: The bike has a Highlander history does it not? AM: Yeah, on the album Harleyluja there was a song called "The Biker's Prayer". The song is about a biker who is dying after having an accident and who asks his friends not to sell his bike after he is gone. The new album is a continuation of the story. It turns out that the biker has a son who now inherits the bike. The father had had the bike nearly his whole life and had worked on it, rebuilt it and cared for it. You could say it was his whole life and now in death his soul has entered the machine. The son, who is basically a young kid who has done nothing with his life up to now, inherits the bike but sees it just as a status symbol with which he can ponce around on and show off. His father's soul within the bike doesn't think much of this and decides it's time to show his son where he comes from – his family, ancestors and history. At one point the son is driving around showing off on the bike and when he reaches a certain rev count he disappears into the past. That was his first jump in time.
CB: OK. So presumably each song on the album is about a different period of Scottish history AM: Each song tells the story of where the kid appears in time and what he experiences. Sometimes he lands in the middle of a battle, sometimes he's way back in the Pictish times, sometimes in the eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth century. It's all about the people he meets and the situations he finds himself in as he is jumping around time. He has absolutely no control over the where and the when of the jumps. On the first jump he meets a young woman and falls in love and is really happy to be where he is. He doesn't realize what his father has in store for him and the next time he gets on his bikeagain and reaches the rev count he jumps in time again. So the rest of the album is about him trying to get back to his girlfriend not to his own time.
CB: So in a way you could say that the album is about two of the most important questions in a person's life - "where do I come from?" and "will I find true love?" AM: The album is also about materialism, idealism and love. When the young man meets the girl he realizes that having this amazing bike to show off on isn't the main thing in life. He just wants to get back to her and he now realizes that when he reaches the particular rev count then he will jump in time but unfortunately for him he doesn't know where or when he'll end up.
CB: The father is still controlling that? Presumably he wont allow his son to get to his girlfriend until he's finished showing him everything he wants him to see? AM: Not just that. The father also wants to teach him something about life at the same time.
CB: Does the son find his true love again? AM: Actually he does. At some point he ends up back in his own time and figures that if he hits the rev count at the right time while driving down the same road he was on when he made his first jump then there is a good chance he will get back to his lassie. So he is reunited with her and stays there instead of trying to bring her to his own time.
AM: Well obviously it's a rock album. It is sometimes mystical and sometimes straight rock. The songs are long...
CB: Sounds a bit like Prog-Rock! AM: Yes, the album definitely has it's roots in the progressive rock of the 1970s which fits with the concept of jumping in time. It's also definitely Scottish but there are no ballads! Some songs are faster than others - but no ballads. Some songs touch the down to earth Scottish folk music and use bagpipes, fiddle and harp but they always return to heavy rock - heavy drums and bass and loads and loads of guitar.
CB: And presumably as a five piece you now have lots of keyboards? AM: On every track. It would be hard to get the mystical element across without the help of keyboards in the background but they don't play a major part at all on any of the songs. They are only used to create an atmosphere. The guitar is the main instrument although, as one would expect from a Scottish album, the drums are very prominent. There are also more backing vocals compared to previous Highlander albums but we tried not to overdo it - we are not the Beach Boys!
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