Brian has said in the last year or so that the drums on 'Last Horizon' (studio version) are played by Cozy Powell.
As far as I recall, the credits on 'Back To The Light' list everything that he played on, and htis isn't one of the tracks. my ears absolutely tell me that the drums on that are programmed too, and simply don't sound or feel like a real drummer, especially not Cozy.
Is Brian making things up again and losing his marbles, or am I?!!???
I haven't listened to it recently with attention to the drums. If he's wrong, perhaps he's remembering a session where Cozy did play drums for the song, but Brian nonetheless ended up using fake ones.
It's clear that Brian's not trying to distort the past when he says inaccurate things, he just has an utterly terrible memory (bad enough that he forgot having played Hard Life for the entire Works tour).
I've a really really tiny snippet( Single release) about "Last Horizon" from a german magazine. Cozy Powell wasn't mentioned....
Maybe that points in your direction, because in those Reviews they try to gain as much attention from potential buyers as they can get...and Cozy was a "name" to the rock community back then( and still is ).
NO EVIDENCE of course - just mentioned.
tomchristie22 wrote:
It's clear that Brian's not trying to distort the past when he says inaccurate things, he just has an utterly terrible memory (bad enough that he forgot having played Hard Life for the entire Works tour).
To be fair, it's not 'an utterly terrible memory' as much as it's merely a 'normal' one. He, despite being an exceptional musician, is 'just' a human being like anybody else and, like anybody else, he shouldn't be expected to remember every little detail of what he did at work two or three decades earlier.
Memory works that way: he surely remembers common denominators about Cozy and the general chemistry they had. As for accurately retrieving every song they recorded together, how many takes they did, which studios they were in and who was engineering, that can get blurried, and it's quite easy to mistake one song for another in that case: around 1982, he said he'd played a koto on 'Teo Torriatte', a very understandable mistake considering 'Prophet's Song' was recorded around the same era and the Japanese connexion might have tricked him, or when he said Fred had written 'Bicycle Race' after seeing the Tour de France in Nice (logic would prompt him to assume he saw the Tour de France in ... well, France, even though he actually saw it in Switzerland as the Tour de France isn't just in France).
Brian's memory has consolidated aspects about playing live gigs with possibly overwhelming clarity. Certain smells, noises, habits, etc., are as clear to him as it would be for the average person to tell their parents' voices even after years of not talking to them. The exact setlist for every single tour, however, is far less clear to him.
That guitar solo or concert that for some people was the defining moment of their lives, might have been for him just another day in the office. Nobody outside fictional portrayals of eidetic memory has been proved to remember every single day in the office.
So... sure, Brian said, many years after the fact, that Cozy'd played drums on 'Last Horizon.' Maybe he was wrong... maybe he mistook it for any of the several songs on which Cozy did play. It's as simple as that.
All good points guys - cheers.
What is frustrating in this case is that someone wrote to Brian's letters page making a specific point about the drum track, along the lines of how did he programme it so well.....to which Brian replied with great afront that it was Cozy's playing and so it was a great compliment to his timing etc that someone automatically assumed it was a machine.
In this instance I think Brian should perhaps have actually listened back to the track, or checked his notes to remind himself, and then he would have realised that it was in fact one of the tracks he didn't play on.
There may well be a Cozy version somewhere, but it sure isn't what's on the album.
Brian played everything on that track, including the electronic drums.
The Real Wizard wrote:
There may well be a Cozy version somewhere, but it sure isn't what's on the album.
Brian played everything on that track, including the electronic drums.
Thanks. It could well be that there is a studio version with Cozy on (in a similar vein to the second version of Driven By You), and indeed Seb he could have been confusing himself with the live version (which as we know was a single release).
Glad to know that the consensus/fact is that it IS indeed a machine drum track as my ears have always told me!!