INFLUENCES

Andy Pask describes the early experiences, people and sounds that shaped his career in music.

From the beginning I was surrounded by music, mostly ecclesiastical. My father worked as a semi-professional church musician his entire life (though his career was at the Bank of England) and my mother was an excellent pianist. Aged seven, I started learning the piano and joined my father’s choir. At nine I boarded at New College School in Oxford, a prep school that supplies choristers for the New College choir. For four years, during term time, I sang at two choir practices and a service six days a week, plus recordings and broadcasts. Although unpaid, it was an almost professional situation. We covered a wide repertoire of church music and many of the choirboys later had careers in music; Howard Goodall, Nick Glennie-Smith, Martin Pickard and Stephen W. Tayler were among my contemporaries. Although I didn’t pursue a career in singing or classical music, the New College experience runs deep. All through my career I have worked with orchestras, mainly as a rhythm section player.

At New College we weren’t allowed radios, possibly to limit cacophony or to control our cultural exposure. The upshot was that I had almost no access to non-classical music, other than TV at home during the holidays. In my last year I circumvented the ban by building my own radio. My first two record purchases – ‘Israelites’ by Desmond Dekker and the Aces and ‘Classical Gas’ by Mason Williams – were pretty good indicators of the role that groove and crossover music would play in my life.

I started playing cello at the age of ten and won a music scholarship to my secondary school, Haileybury College near Hertford, about twenty miles from London. I have always been interested in electronics and when I was about thirteen I built my own electric guitar. It was terrible but it worked. Two years later, Robin Millar (a friend of my sister’s, who later became a record producer) sourced a bass guitar for me. Musicians don’t choose their instrument, the instrument chooses them.

My first school bands were Brain Damage, a rock trio, followed by Arctic Summer, a David Bowie-and Cockney Rebel-influenced five piece. During school holidays I got to see artists such as Bowie, Soft Machine, Hawkwind, Emerson Lake and Palmer (ELP), Weather Report and Maynard Ferguson. Meanwhile I was learning the Elgar and Boccherini cello concerti and Bach suites in preparation for college entry. Radio bans were now a thing of the past and we were free to listen to anything. There were a lot of good BBC jazz broadcasts. Since there was a limit to how many commercial records could be broadcast, the BBC commissioned a lot of new recordings and live sessions – I was involved in many of these professionally within a few years.

The first records I started learning the bass to were by Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Jack Bruce, followed by prog bands such as Yes, King Crimson, ELP and Pink Floyd. Around this time (1970) Eddie Harvey joined the Haileybury music department. He was a wonderful composer, arranger and jazz musician who played trombone and piano and had a highly altruistic commitment to music education. He was committed to this right up to his death in 2012. Eddie opened my ears to jazz and suggested I attend a few jazz courses during the summer holidays, some of which he taught at. He also introduced me to Bill Ashton, who directed the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO).

It is hard to over-stress how important NYJO has been to the British commercial and jazz music scene. I did my first gig with them when I was still fifteen and played with them for four or so years. I still work with musicians I knew in the band back then, including Lance Ellington, Guy Barker, Phil Todd, Pete Beachill and Dave Bishop and I am still finding out that players I have been working with for decades also played in NYJO. Absolutely amazing!

Once I started playing jazz, rock and pop I started to understand properly the importance of non-featured session bass players, such as James Jamerson, Carol Kaye, Herbie Flowers, Willie Weeks, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn and Leland Sklar. These bassists made a tremendous contribution to the sound (and success) of many, very popular artists, including Stevie Wonder, Brenda Holloway, David Bowie, Donny Hathaway Otis Redding and James Taylor. And of course I listened to bass players who were more directly involved in jazz, such as Eddie Gomez, Jaco Pastorius, Charles Mingus, Ray Brown, Stanley Clark and Ron Carter.

By the mid-1970s I became a big lover of soul and funk music. The list is endless: James Brown, Stevie Wonder (and pretty much all Motown), Earth Wind and Fire, Gladys Knight, Aretha Franklin, Sly and the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye and so on.

I finished my music education with three years at the Royal Academy of Music and left with a diploma in double bass, a skill I didn’t pursue until 25 years later, preferring to play my first love: bass guitar. When I took up the double bass again, it opened up a wider world of musical opportunities in movie soundtracks, sessions and live performance, such as the Hans Zimmer Live band.

I met the other members of Landscape when I was in my first year at the RAM. I own up to not spending much time at college (all the UK colleges except Leeds only taught classical music at that time); I was out playing bass with anyone I could find and who’d have me – usually for free, but it was career-building and tremendous fun. At one point I was working on a regular basis with eleven different bands, including Landscape; playing morning, afternoon and evening almost every day. As Landscape got busier (we were doing three or four gigs a week and were committed to the project) a lot of my other gigs had to go, but I was still mostly free to work during the day. So I started doing session work. There were too many occasions when I came home from a Landscape gig in the early hours to find a note telling me I had to be in town for an 8am session. Sometimes there wasn’t any point in going to bed, just a cup of tea, back into the car and through the busy London rush hour traffic into the West End …

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Landscape A Go-go: the story of Landscape 1977-83. is out now, available from the Landscape official store, landscape.lnk.to/landscapeagogo