Allan Holdsworth on working with Bill Bruford - Part 2

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Allan’s perspective on things in the 1970s was quietly powerful in its own way in this film. Part One got a lot of attention from viewers, so here’s Part Two as promised.

There are perhaps two kinds of guitar players; those who, when you put a spotlight on stage, walk towards it, and those who walk away from it. Allan was the latter. So was Robert Fripp, who mostly wanted to sit in the dark, or better still, sit off-stage. Something to do with distractions: perhaps they thought the visual might distract the listener from attending to the music; or it might distract the performer from playing it properly. Adrian Belew and Steve Howe moved towards the light. David Torn couldn’t have cared less.

Being largely underlit was not Genesis’ style, a band with whom I worked for a year. For its time, their lighting rig was astonishing. It would get its own round of applause when certain configurations kicked at critical moments, louder than anything the musicians could get. Talk about being up-staged.

Think of the celebrity whose life depends on finding the metaphorical spotlight and remaining within its seductive glow for as long as possible - a moth to the flame. Some performers are exactly the opposite: their public performance seems to be an entirely private affair, one object of which is to prevent we listeners from getting too close.

I know; mad, isn’t it? But who knows why performers do what they do? I’ve known enough to know there is no single answer to that question. The mildly certifiable, the terminally eccentric, the manic depressive, the unacceptably rude; the perfectionist, the guilt-ridden (I’m having so much fun…and they’re paying me to do this?!), the reticent introvert who’s pretending to be an extrovert, and the extrovert who can sustain his pretence only with copious amounts of chemical support: they’re all there, sometimes in the same band. Everyone’s pretending to be someone, putting on the mantle (or cape) of some real or imagined character before they can get on stage. We’re all little David Bowies. Some want to be in the light, some in the dark.

If you ask me, I’m relatively straight-forward on this. I’m a sort of what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of bloke. Hopefully, that makes me easy to work with. I’m comfortable being stared at on a stage - so long as you don’t hinder or inhibit me from delivering what it is I’ve come to deliver - and equally comfortable being ignored. I’d love your attention and enthusiasm - they help a lot - but I can do it with or without. I can do it in the dark or in the light, as many of the videos on this channel demonstrate. Some can only do it in the dark.



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