Lucky Man by Greg Lake

Author:Greg Lake [Lake, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472126474
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Salad Days

The year 1972 was undoubtedly a landmark for ELP – it was one the most creative and positive periods in the band’s entire history. We had come of age musically and had also managed to establish our presence at the very cutting edge of the emerging music technology.

After the success of Trilogy and all of the accolades the band had received during that period, we began to realise, perhaps for the first time, that there was a slight sense of having a reputation to live up to and, of course, having to face up to that same old question, ‘Are you going to be as good as your last hit record?’

For a while, Keith was talking about doing his own solo project but his enthusiasm waned and he was still committed to the band. Perhaps the only dark cloud on the horizon was the realisation that in future we would need to be more careful about the amount of overdubbing we did on our records. Although we had a great deal of confidence in our own writing and creative abilities, no matter how good we were as a live band, the whole Trilogy album remained extremely difficult to replicate in a live performance.

We had come to realise that, unless we intended carrying around a whole team of backing musicians to replicate all of the parts on a record, we had to change our recording techniques. It may sound obvious to anyone reading this now, but at the time multi-track recording was pretty much uncharted territory.

In the end, we came to the conclusion that if we wanted to maintain our basic, three-piece band identity, it was essential for us to be able to perform the next album live first rather than trying to figure out how to perform it all after the record had been made.

Somehow we needed to set up a situation whereby we could fully perform and demo the album live before moving into the studio. The more I thought about this whole idea of live performance, the more I began to realise that the whole essence of this record could revolve around the concept of a theatrical performance.

At around the same time, we formed our own record label called Manticore Records, which was named after the mythical beast that had also inspired the ‘Manticore’ section of ‘Tarkus’. A manticore is often depicted with a human head, the body of a lion and a scorpion’s tale – both Keith and I were born under Scorpio. The idea behind the label was not only for us to better control the production and distribution of our own records, but at the same time to also help other non-mainstream artists (just as we had been helped ourselves in previous years) to get a foot through the door. I liked working with other bands. By then I had already helped to produce Spontaneous Combustion’s debut record, and we signed Stray Dog and a few other bands – including Premiata Forneria Marconi and Banco, two of the biggest acts in Italy – to Manticore Records.

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