2010 was something of a tumultuous year for Progresive rock band The Reasoning, which included a highly acclaimed studio album, two well-received tours of the UK, a successful appearance at the High Voltage festival, an acoustic album and tour, a first visit to Scandanavia in support of Pagan’s Mind and eventually the pressure of having to cope with band members, including singer, guitarist and founder member Dylan Thompson, resigning a mere two weeks before the start of a British tour. Eventually the year ended on something of a high note with the band (now comprised of Rachel Cohen on vocals, Owain Roberts, guitar, Tony Turrell, keyboards and vocals, Matthew Cohen, bass and Jake Bradford-Sharp, drums) featuring prominently in the Classic Rock Rock Presents Prog Readers Poll, with both band and album being recognised and even some individual success for Jake Bradford-Sharp, being placed in the Top 5 drummers, along side such famous names as Mike Portnoy and Neil Peart. 2011 promises to be equally as eventful, with the band ready to play their first dates in the USA , and they’re currently writing for their third album. Midlands Rocks Paul Quinton sat down with band founder Matthew Cohen to look back over a highly eventful twelve months and forward to what could be a very successful 2011.

Interview by Paul Quinton

Midlands Rocks: You’ve had quite an eventful year, line up changes, High Voltage, an acoustic tour and a very well received album. How do you look back on it at the end of the year?

Matthew Cohen: 2010 was a year full of promise, of which many came to fruition. It was also a year of, it sounds like a cliché this, of finding ourselves. Me especially, more than everybody else, in understanding how the music business works, understanding how bands work, how touring works. We’ve done loads of this before, but we had to up the game in 2010, and we did. We wrote a great album, that I’m very proud of, played a lot of great gigs and learned a lot. That seems to be a recurring thing, learning and being productive. That’s how I’d sum up 2010: productive.

MR: Adverse Camber was such a good album, but you originally scheduled two studio albums for 2010, releasing Adverse Camber in the Spring, and then planning a follow up album in the Autumn. I read one review that mentioned how short Adverse Camber was, but they obviously didn’t know what the original intention was. What was the thinking behind the plan to record and release two albums in a year?

MC: I think, regardless of who it is, I’m not really a fan of albums that are over 50-55 minutes long. I have a lot of favourite albums that are that length of time, but from a personal point of view, I have a very short attention span when it comes to listening to music. I want a fix and I like the classic way of doing things. I love the fact that you would get an album by Rainbow or Deep Purple or Iron Maiden, you’d have two sides of music and you would physically have a break. You would take in one side and go ‘oh, that’s fantastic’, and you could get up, go do whatever you had to, then come back and listen to the other side. I like that, and I think that with today’s way of recording, and I understand why people do it, you have 80 minutes, possibly, to fill up on a CD and I don’t think you should always have to do that. I think it’s nice that you give people a bit of space, leave them wanting more, because that’s how I feel, thinking ‘Oh! Why’s it ended, I wanted to hear more’, but that means it was the right amount to get me interested again when the next album came out.

MR: There’s also the ‘spreading yourself thin’ argument as well. Reign In Blood by Slayer is only 28 minutes long. It physically couldn’t be any longer because (a) the band couldn’t pack any more into it and (b) it’s so physically intense you’re a physical wreck after listening to it anyway.

MC: Absolutely. But with the sister album, the intention was, as we had so much material, not to stick it all on one album for that very reason. I didn’t want to put out 80 minutes of music in one go. But with how busy we got, it just turned out to be a step too far for us. We did achieve it, in that we did put out two albums and we did do a DVD. Everything we promised, just not in the order we intended.

 

MR: Just out of interest, after High Voltage, you still intended to do the two albums, then the acoustic stuff came up. Was it the acoustic tour that that caused you to say ‘No, we can’t do two albums after all’?

MC: The acoustic stuff actually made me realise who The Reasoning are, and therefore I wanted to take that on board a bit more rather than dive straight into writing another album. The acoustic album was a revelation for me because we’re quite fast in the studio, in the way we work and the way we write, and with the acoustic album, we recorded it in two weeks, and then sent it off for mastering, pressing and everything else. But I had time to re-evaluate the songs and look at them again. On the acoustic album, they’re very different versions of what I think are great songs in the first place and it was nice to go back and think ‘Oh yeah, we can have a bit more space there’. By its very nature, acoustic music will give you that space anyway, but we could rearrange stuff, bass lines were changed, keyboard parts were changed, vocal lines were changed, and we often thought ‘Why didn’t we do that on the other albums?’ which was very interesting. But I came to realise who everybody was in the band, what they were capable of, because sometimes in the studio, it flies by so quickly and you miss things. And I’m not saying we hadn’t dedicated time to crafting an album we thought was great, we wouldn’t have released it if we hadn’t thought that, but sometimes schedules….., you’d like to spend a little bit longer. Acoustically Speaking, for me, in the long term, was The Reasoning like I’d never heard The Reasoning and I loved it. Therefore I didn’t want to rush back into the studio and record another album. It was something quite special, it’s the one album I listen to most out of all our stuff.

 

MR: You said you did a lot more material for Adverse Camber. Much more than made it on to the finished album?

MC: About 60-70 minutes of material overall.

 

MR: Is that material just going to be shelved? Is there nothing that can be used in the future?

MC: It will be shelved. There’s a lot we can use, but I think in light of the fact that we are now a five piece band, and a lot of that was written with Dylan, it wouldn’t be right to put that material out now. It will be nice for the band to come out with something fresh. Whether that material somewhere down the line sees the light of day, I’m not sure. But at this stage, I’m not interested in it.

 

MR: So, going back almost twelve months now, to when it was a different band in some ways, you said yourself how pleased you were with Adverse Camber, but you must have been really pleased with the reviews. As far as I can see, in terms of your public profile, it lifted the band to a whole new level.

MC: Absolutely. That’s the only way I ever see reviews, and again, learned a lot. A lot of people compare, don’t they, which is a natural process to happen with albums. I can’t listen to that. I’ve got to take it on its own merits. So for me the most important thing about reviews is the fact that it puts us out there, not necessarily what they say, but that it puts the name of the band out there, and that for me is the most important thing, because good reviews or bad reviews, people can sill make up their own minds regardless, and they can go and check us out. Yes, a great review is great, but as so many musicians have said, if we listen to everything people say, we’d be pretty messed up, you would never actually find a balance. That’s quite true, and I’ve found that more and more. Yes I love hearing the good reviews, but for me, it’s the people out front who turn up at the gigs, who enjoy the shows, enjoy the music, that’s the most important. But without the reviewers, they might not be there. It goes hand in hand. It’s like getting a compliment. If someone says ‘Oh, you’re just fantastic’, it’s sometimes hard to take because you have a very different perspective on what an album’s about or what you’re about, what that process was and everything else. As long as people like it and as long as people turn up and as long as people have a good time, that’s the only thing that matters to me. The reviews, if it ups the profile, you’re right, fantastic.

 

MR: So if you if you read something and they’ve totally failed to get the band, you don’t get bent out of shape about that?

MC: I’ve had that one. I had an e-mail from a guy in Iceland. He ripped the album, absolutely ripped it apart. I don’t know what he was expecting from the album, I really don’t. If I went out there to create an album for what people expected of us, we’d probably just be treading the same old path.

 

MR: Anyone who followed your regular updates on The Reasoning’s website during the making of Adverse Camber would know that you deliberately changed the writing process for the album. What was different this time?

MC: Really, we didn’t write complete songs. We wrote hundreds of different ideas and then from the ideas we crafted and created songs, and often that would spark something else. With Awakening, we flogged it to death and same with Dark Angel. ‘Oh, we’ve got to make that work, where’s that going to go from there?’ With Adverse Camber, we said ‘that’s not working there, let’s put it aside, let’s move onto the next one, and then come back to it’. And often there was another part we’d written we thought might be perfect for the part we were stuck on. It led naturally and it was a whole different feel.

 

MR: And it never gets stale then, if you can leave it and come back to it, rather than flogging it to death. So presumably, you fell a lot more comfortable doing it that way.

MC: Sure, and that’s why we’re doing it this time as well.

 

MR; So, turning to the live arena. You opened the second day of the High Voltage Festival on the Prog Stage. For me it went brilliantly, the crowd response was amazing. What are your memories of the day?

MC: High Voltage, wow! What an opportunity, what a way to sell your wares, and sell who you are, and yet at the same time just take in something that you only ever dream of. I’ve been to so many festivals, the first big one was Donnington in 1988 with Iron Maiden, and to be on a stage in that sort of environment, it’s clichéd, but that’s the stuff dreams are made of, that’s why you want to be in a band. For the music, obviously, but for that experience of being able to play in front of four and a half thousand people. We thought maybe a maximum of 500 people would be there, genuinely, and we were backstage wondering who was going to be there. I popped my head round the side before we went on and I was like ‘AAARGH!’ but as soon as we walked out and just saw it and everybody got behind us. We had four songs, 20 minutes, we had to be tight, we had to be rocking, but still give everybody what they wanted. You get the singalongs like Aching Hunger or Dark Angel, which people can get involved in, but we still had to show what Adverse Camber was about. So, balancing that set, I think we did it right, and I think time has proven that we did it right., the DVD of the concert shows it was right.

 

MR: You had four songs, how hard was it to put the set together?

MC: I knew we had to put two in from Adverse Camber, because that’s what we were out promoting. But I also had to make sure we had songs from the other two albums. How do you pick those songs? Do you pick Awakening, that people love? Or do you pick Aching Hunger or even Shadows Of The Mind? But Shadows Of The Mind was a little too long to put in the set at that time, so it had to be Aching Hunger. And from Dark Angel, I would have done A Musing Dream. It would have been superb to have done A Musing Dream there.

 

MR: And bearing in mind you were on the Prog Stage, that’s one of the proggiest things you do.

MC: And Sharp Sea. But then the other side of that, because it was the Prog Stage, I didn’t want to do the big prog thing either. So it was finding that balance. We all know that I’m more of a heavy metal guy and a rock guy, and while I love my prog, for me it was all about finding that balance to represent both angles of what we do. We couldn’t, in 20 minutes, put in any flowing, melodic sections, it’s not that sort of gig. You don’t have the lighting or the atmospherics. It’s a rock festival, you’ve got to go out there and rock, you cannot go out there and go all arty-farty and wishy-washy, leave big spaces where nothing happens, because you lose that dynamic, and with people walking around buying beer, other things going on in the background, how can you recapture that? So for us, it was about ‘let’s rock!’

 

MR: Did you get much feedback from the other bands?

MC: We spoke to quite a few musicians. There were a lot of people who really enjoyed what we did, who said nothing but genuinely nice things, and that meant an awful lot.

 

MR: I haven’t read any bad things about the set anywhere. You’re never going to please everyone, but this seems to have been well-received right across the board.

MC: As we said, we’ve got to do this for ourselves ultimately. If we’re lucky enough to have people join our little journey with us, well, you can’t ask for more than that. We’re very realistic that we’re not going to please everybody, but we have an incredible fan base. I feel that people who come along to our shows are a part of a friendship and part of a family, and part of what makes this tick, and work, and without them, the music’s irrelevant. They add to that atmosphere that builds it and builds it and makes it all work.

 

MR: So, after High Voltage, there were the acoustic shows, which included one of the best shows I’ve ever seen you do, at St. John’s Church, in Derbyshire.

MC: But then, isn’t that what I was saying about the acoustic album? You got to see what The Reasoning are about and that was what happened to me when we were recording the album and laying it down. And making it work. All of a sudden Rachel had her space, which I think had been something that was seriously lacking. Since the earlier days of the band, and with Dylan as well, we talked about Rach having a more dominant role in the band because she’s never had that. She joined during Awakening, when it had already mostly been made. For Dark Angel, we tried to distribute the vocals a little bit more, but it became difficult, let’s be honest, we had a load of singers. But then you’ve got a very talented front woman, who’s done an awful lot, and has a very beautiful voice, a very dynamic voice and also an incredible stage presence, why the hell can’t she be given more space? It was agreed in the previous line up that Adverse Camber was going to be far more in that way, and I think Rach pushed herself in a way she hasn’t pushed herself before.

 

MR: She seemed to be singing well outside her comfort zone as well. Someone wrote about her having a ‘floaty’ voice, which in Karnataka suited their style of music. But then with Adverse Camber, it’s a lot rockier than anything Karnataka ever did, with maybe a couple of exceptions, and she seemed to be thinking ‘I can’t do this as Rachel from Karnataka, I’ve really got to put this out there’.

MC: Definitely, and we will bring those elements over to the new album, and as Acoustically Speaking taught me about people’s strengths, not their weaknesses, their strengths, it’s time to bring out those strengths more and more and that goes for each and everyone of us. I realised that then and that’s what’s going to help craft this album, to make it something very different again to Adverse Camber and that excites me.

 

MR: After the acoustic shows, and when you originally announced the November tour, the idea was for it to be ‘An Evening With The Reasoning’, where you opened with some acoustic material and then would do a full electric set. Obviously with the line up changes, this never happened, but is this something you would want to do in the future?

MC: Yeah, I’d love to. I was disappointed that we couldn’t have done that for those dates. And then because of the way it all happened, two weeks before the tour, we didn’t have a chance to even get a support band in. we were too busy concentrating on getting our set together, making sure the five of us got our songs together and everything was working, which it did, and it was great, but there was no way we were going to put an acoustic set together. But yes, it is something I want to do again and probably will. Whether we do it in that format I’m not sure, but I definitely think we’ll have ‘An Evening With…’

 

MR: Would you want to do the acoustic stuff first and then the full band come on, or play the acoustic set in the middle of the show, the same as Rush did?

MC: Yes, I kind of liked that, but I think the problem with that is, unless you are Rush, unless you have 20,000 sat in front of you, it breaks the set up too much, really loses the momentum. If we’re going to do it, then we’ll do it in another way. I’m not quite sure how, that’s why I’m being vague, I want to do ‘An Evening With…’, but I don’t know how we’re going to do it.

 

MR: I have to talk about the line up changes. Bands change line ups all the time, but you said yourself, it was two weeks before the tour. How close did you come to pulling the dates?

MC: I don’t think I was ever going to pull it. I didn’t know how we were going to do it, but I had utter belief in the five of us. My only concern was that we had two weeks, and with the band spread around the country, we had to pull everybody in really quickly, and they all jumped to it, they were amazing. That first rehearsal, it was like ‘OK, we’re on’ and we knew within three songs, it’s ‘game on, we’re doing it’. Owain just stepped up. I think he’s always fought to define his role in the band when we had two guitars and a keyboard, and now as a one guitar band, he relishes it, he loves it, and it’s worked beautifully. Rach had her space, finally, and she came alive. TT, like everybody, worked so hard, but he had a real job, because all of a sudden, he went from being a backing vocalist to actually taking on some lead singing and harmony vocals, and he just stepped up, it was amazing. And of course me and Jake doing backing vocals as well to supplement that. Jake and I, I think, pulled in together tighter than we’ve ever pulled in before. The whole experience was incredible.

How close were we to pulling the dates? I don’t think we were that close. In the back of our minds, I think, was ‘is this going to happen?’ but I was not going to let anybody down, and I wasn’t going to do that because of anyone else. If someone had been seriously ill, fair enough. But people had bought tickets, we’d had the dates booked for a long time. I’m not out there to upset people, and I do know that if the shoe was on the other foot, and I had tickets to see a band, and I have been there, I’ve been gutted, so you try anything you can to put the show on. I said to someone, if my back’s against the wall, I come out fighting, and I think the band came out fighting.

 

MR: How prepared were you for an adverse reaction? That’s purely theoretical, of course, because the crowd’s reaction everywhere was phenomenal.

MC: I didn’t have time to think about it. All I thought about was ‘we’ve got to get out there and do this’. If we cancelled, the adverse reaction then would have been something I would have thought about. It wasn’t until after the first gig, I think, that I thought ‘Oh God, what would have happened if we’d messed that up?’

 

MR: You have to give most of the audience some credit, though. They would have understood. They would have appreciated that you put things on the line in getting out there and doing it so soon after the upheaval. There would have been some numpties, but they’re out there anyway.

MC: Listen, I had e-mails going ‘the band’s finished without Dylan.’ People posting here, there and everywhere ‘the band’s finished, the band’s finished’. But it’s not their band, how dare they? They don’t tell me if the band’s finished or not. That’s my decision and the band’s decision. Yes, Dylan leaving was upsetting, and he’s a dear friend, and that was after five years working with him. He made his choice, good luck to him, but don’t tell me the band’s finished., that’s for us to decide , not for you. Unless you decide not to turn up to the gigs. But then, people did turn up to the gigs. People’s reactions, that was something I was not expecting, for the reaction to be that positive. In fact, it was more positive than it’s ever been.

 

MR: Maybe it wasn’t the biggest crowd in Glasgow, but all things considered, you all played astonishingly well. But by the time you got to the Robin, with your own crowd in there, that’s when things really happened.

MC: I’m glad we didn’t play to a big crowd in Glasgow, because we genuinely had to find our feet. Especially for me and Jake to get up to the mic. And Rach, remember, hadn’t sung for three weeks, because she lost her voice and had a cold on top of everything else, and that was the first day she’d sung since. So there were those nerves. It turned out that she had about 85% of her voice back on the night, literally not being able to speak. That’s why I’m glad there wasn’t a big crowd, it was nice for us just to dip our toes in and go ‘OK, we need this experience before we moved down south where we knew the audience was going to be bigger’.

 

MR: Playing Scotland is always important, and they seem to be so appreciative that people make the effort to play there.

MC: It’s essential. Every time I drive into Scotland, I get excited, I don’t know what it is. I love Scotland, I really do. The same when we went to Newcastle, the next day. Fantastic city. What a fantastic bunch of friends we have there. You’ve got to remember we had new people turn up to the shows who’ve never seen us, and they were like, ‘Brilliant! Great!’ Some people didn’t know that Dylan had left, either, but they turned up, and not taking anything away from him, we put on a great show for them as The Reasoning. The Reasoning is five people now, and that’s the way it’s going to be.

 

MR: Which was going to be my next question, because it’s worked so well, are you going to stay with the five piece line-up?

MC: Oh, we’re staying with the five piece. It breathes now. Seven was mental, what were we thinking? Again, I’m not taking anything away from anyone, I’m talking logistically, space-wise, sound-wise, frequency dynamics-wise. Where the hell do you go with seven people, when some of our stuff is quite full on? Most of my favourite bands in the world are five piece. Why the hell have I never done it before? It’s great and definitely staying that way.

 

MR: With regard to the five piece, for me, one of the band’s trademarks has been the vocals. With the five piece line-up, will you be able to carry that on?

MC: Of course it’s not going to be the same, it changed as soon as Adverse Camber came out.

 

MR: You’re still going to be writing for multiple vocals, though.

MC: Of course we are. I’m going to take on more of the vocals. I’ve always done part of the vocals and I’ve always helped with the vocal melodies as well. For me, it was all about finding my feet and confidence in front of the mic. I have a voice, I have a range, I’m not saying it’s a huge range, but I know I can hold a tune. It’s the same with Owain and Jake. We know that TT obviously has a great voice, so we’ve got two main singers immediately, it’s going to be down to the three of us to come in on the supporting role, which is how it always was in The Reasoning anyway. There was always one lead vocal with two supporting. There were never three lead vocals going at the same time. Now it’s going to be the same principle but Rach is going to be the complete lead singer now, which again, was always the intention. Yes it’s going to be different, but thank God for that! I want it to be different, I told you I don’t want the same stuff. I don’t want to walk down that path again, and on stage Rach has said ‘Change? Why are we fighting change?’ and I’m a firm believer in change as well.

 

MR: So now we look to 2011. How far have you got your plans for the year roughed out?

MC: We’ve got the next 24 months roughed out. We know what we’re going to be doing from now until January 2013.

 

MR: So I presume it’s going to be writing and recording, then you’re off to the States in May for Rosfest.

MC: Then we’re off to Rosfest, which we can’t wait for. I played there before, in 2005, with Magenta, and had a whale of a time. So to go back with The Reasoning is just incredible. So I’m looking forward to that. And we’ve got new management on board now, Adrian Holmes of Moriarty Music. Very professional, knows his stuff, doesn’t take any rubbish, gets on and does his job, looking forward to working with him, that’s going to be exciting. He’s going to take on certain aspects of the job that I’ve been doing and make them his own, so I can get on with what I do with Comet Music and with the band itself. 2011’s all about writing, recording, releasing and touring and touring. Plus we’re going to do a lot more acoustic shows as well.

 

MR: So when are you back on stage, acoustic or otherwise?

MC: I think the first time we’re going to hit the stage this year is going to be in America. We want to concentrate on the music and getting that sorted. We’re going to introduce three new songs at Rosfest, so we’ve got to get those sorted, we’ve got three months now, so we’d better get on with it!

 

MR: You’ve always released your albums yourself, you’re responsible for everything from writing, all the way through to manufacturing and releasing. Is that something you’d be reluctant to give up, even if a label came in with an offer?

MC: I would never give it up. Our business model has proved, at this time, to be the thing to do. The music industry is on its knees, it’s still very fertile, but it’s changed dramatically. The days of the big majors are gone. You’ve just seen that EMI have been handed over to Citibank because they can’t handle their debts and that leaves, what, Sony? You’ve just got one or two major labels out there, the small independents aren’t so small anymore either, they’re actually becoming more like the majors, but the home grown industry, it used to be called the cottage industry, that’s become the norm now. Comet Music’s not a cottage industry, though, the amount of work that goes into running this company is too much.

 

MR: I’m surprised they still call it a cottage industry, when the first band who did it that way were Marillion. Since then it’s become known as the ‘Marillion model’ in some places.

MC: They’re just an inspiration for a lot of bands anyway, the way they conduct themselves and run their business. The problem is you have to have a lot of balls and you’ve got to go out and be prepared to take a pounding and you’ve got to be prepared to throw a lot of money at it. If you’ve got that money, you’re lucky, so you go ahead and take those risks. It’s like anything, it can be a bit hit and miss, but it’s the way to go now in this game. You have complete control. It’s not hard to get your product out with the Internet, that helps dramatically. It’s how you use it, and I think that’s the problem with a lot of bands. People talk about giving away music for free, I can kind of see that, but why should you? Sure the pricing can differ because of downloads, but I don’t think anything should be free or be expected to be free. There’s no big money anymore, you don’t have the old days of the 80s where you could become a millionaire overnight. So it becomes the art of survival. Longevity becomes far more important these days. Yes, you have to have the right distribution, you have to have the savvy, and yes, you have to have the balls to do it, but you’ve got to have the music as well. You get all these combinations together and you can start to do something, and I think we’re really starting to find our feet with that now.

 

MR: Finally, the Classic Rock Presents Prog poll. You had such an amazing result, in the best band section, best album and for Jake in Best Drummer as well.

MC: It means the world. What an absolute result. Voted by the people who turn up at your gigs and buy the music, who share the whole experience with you. To be voted 4^th Best Band, 5^th Best album, and Jake 5^th best drummer, that’s incredible.

 

MR: I would have hoped Rachel would have had some recognition as Female Vocalist. This year, especially, she’s done a fantastic job under the circumstances.

MC: The perception of The Reasoning, though, is that we have three lead vocalists, that’s how we started out. Things change and that perception now changes because Rach is the lead singer.. That’s how I always wanted it. I knew Dylan had a great voice, I knew Gareth (Jones, former keyboard player in the band) had a great voice, but I didn’t see them as fronting the band. But Rach, I did see fronting this band, and now that she is, it’s great. And maybe next time, people will see The Reasoning as fronted by her. All the people that got into that poll, they all front the band. Adverse Camber wasn’t solely fronted by Rach, it was still co-fronted by Dyl. I’m chuffed for Jake, he’s worked his socks off, bless him. 18 years old, what a thing to be thrown into and he’s dealt with everything. I’m proud of all of them, but I’m very proud of Jake. So to see 4^th Best Band with all the changes? Thank you very much, that’s the best news I could possibly get. What a recognition for five people who’ve worked very hard under difficult circumstances, to come out and get that. Pleased as Punch.

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