Adrian's Silver threads among the gold

By Andy Bradshaw Metal Hammer No. 21, vol. 4 (late 89?)

Adrian Smith presents the modest face of rock. Most lead guitarists will regale you with tales of outright debauchery, hedonism and general making of hay while the sun doth shine. Most guitarists who are part of an internationally successful rock band tend to want to put out solo albums consisting of widdly-widdly guitar indulgences. NOT so Adrian Smith.

"Silver and Gold" is an album which completely "knocked my socks off" so to speak and delivers a set of ten songs which are nothing like the preconceptions I had drawn up in my mind.

For a man who is supposed to have been taking time off along with the rest of Iron Maiden, Adrian Smith and Project sound like a band who have either worked unbelievably hard in a very short time, or have been together for a correspondingly long time!

In order to express my utter astonishment at having my illusions about solo projects completely shattered, I met up with Adrian at EMI's London offices to talk to him about his glittering achievement.

He arrived looking somewhat hassled. He was after an hour late. London's infamous traffic had claimed another hapless victim. He was plied with tea and invited to soothe his ruffled nerves before we began.

It has been well documented how Adrian used to work with an outfit called "the Broadway Brats" and "Urchin" and also how with Nicko McBrain he played a few light hearted gigs in a band under the moniker of "The Entire Population of Hackney". What I was keen to know was whether he had waited a long time for a chance to go out and do his own thing?

"Well I used to sing in a band for years and this was something that I had always wanted to do, but it was just a matter of the right timing. It just so happened that this year the vibe was right to do it and having kept in contact with the guys from "Urchin" and "The Broadway Brats", Dave Colwell and Andy Barnett, we got together to do the album. We had pencilled this time in to put something together during this break with Iron Maiden, so we recorded some demos and started writing some material."

The songs sound nothing like the material which you would expect from a Maiden guitarist. I asked him whether he found himself writing a great deal of material outside Maiden?

"Not really, I write songs only if I have to! I'm not a particularly prolific. I don't get up in the morning and start to write or anything. I normally take the approach that I've got to come up with some songs so I sit down and work at it until I do. It's very satisfying to come with good songs, but I do find it a bit of a wrench to do it."

Steve Harris recent mentioned that he had heard some older Adrian Smith songs and was a little surprised he had not included any of these on the album. Was this a deliberate move?

"Yeah, there were some older songs such as a song called "Lady" which we used to do about ten years ago which I suppose we could have used, but I suppose there's this psychological thing where you want to come up with new material. Maybe there is some old stuff which may be one day resurrected. I think what happened was that I just got my down writing and completely forgot the old stuff!"

Adrian was supposed to be taking a year off. I would hardly call sitting down and writing and recording an album over a period of seven months a nice quiet rest by the seaside!

"It was more a question of a change being as good as a rest. I must admit I did find myself at some points asking myself why I was doing it, as it started right off the back of a tour. There were a lot of things happening in my personal life too, my wife was pregnant, we were moving house and there I was trying to write songs with the guys coming round making a racket! In addition to all that, because it was essentially all running through me, there wasn't a spare moment when I wasn't on the phone to someone. It was very enjoyable, even though it was quite hard work and I learned a great deal, particularly singing for the first time on record. I look at it this way, I can spend the rest of my life putting feet up but this is what I want to do now."

What particularly surprised me about the album was Adrian's voice. The first time I hit the "play" button on my Walkman I remember thinking "I must find out who the vocalist is . . ." only to find out it was none other than Mr. Smith himself! For a guitarist who'd never sung as a front man it must have been quite daunting the first time when he was standing there in front of a great big vocal mike with the tapes rolling in the background recording every little nuance and vocal inflection.

"We rehearsed for there weeks and we were kind of loose about the whole thing. We had a lot of fun and went out to clubs and things, but we didn't really hone it all down too much in rehearsal, we just got together, had a few beers and effectively played a gig. We didn't do much pre-production either until the producer Steven came in at the last minute. But yeah, when it came down to that first take it was pretty nerve wracking, but that it's all a lot easier. You have to take direction form the control room and learn as you go along."

Were there any vocal lessons involved anywhere down the line?

"A year or two ago I had proper singing lessons. I'd never had any before but I thought I'd give it a go. I so there I was singing all these "proper" songs and scales standing next to his piano feeling a complete prat! I thought then that if I could do that then I could do anything. Fortunately, I couldn't apply any of this new found knowledge to what I was doing with this and I reverted back to my basic shout with a few vocal licks here and there! Luckily, the texture of my voice seems to fill up the space on the track, which is good because I don't really have a range. Also, I write to suit my voice and within my limitations."

What I find frustrating about the albums is that if this were a new British young band we would be sitting round promising great things for them, but all it is a project. It seems a great shame if this is not going to be taken any further than just a one off release, with no live dates to accompany the album.

"Well, the more I think about it and the more people ask if I'm going to gig the material and the band, the more I'm inclined to think about doing it. At the moment having spent what amounts to seven months working on this album, what I am really thinking about is trying to catch up on other things. The last thing I want to do is put myself under the added pressure of a tour. Apart from that there is not enough time before Maiden gets back together to make an impression with enough gigs. The only sort of gigs we'd be able to do would be showcases which would just be in major cities, which even then is quite a lot of pressure. But as the pressure of the album is now easing of I am starting to seriously think about going out there. I know the guys in the band certainly are. Ideally, I'd like to do a parallel thing with Maiden. It all depends on how much interest is generated by the album."

Adrian admitted that he would feel naked going on stage without a guitar in front of him but that would not deter him from going up there and fronting the band. He used the term "band" more often than "project" which implies a number of things, particularly that although it is headed up with his name, more than just his input goes into what happens in terms of writing and arrangement. There is more to it than even that, because the overall sound of the band has that tightness which only comes from a band and not just a bunch of randomly assembled session men. Adrian explains why.

"The band is a band in its own right! The guys play together as a unit called "Ran". Andy Barnett sings the lead vocals in that and plays lead guitar. ON the album the two of us play the lead lines, so it's a case of "whammy bars at dawn", as someone said! Then there's Bucket who plays a lot of the more textured stuff on the album and he played a few of the solos too."

As the band was the "Adrian Smith Project" as such, did he find himself becoming precious at any point about doing all the solos or was it all done in a relaxed atmosphere?

"We actually joked about this, because yeah there could have been a problem if I'd been funny about it. We worked it all out OK so that everyone was happy, because unlike in Maiden where there are two solos in every song in these there is generally only one because the songs are so much shorter. At the end of the day though there was enough work for everyone to do without them feeling hard done by. It got to the point at times where because we did a lot of over-dubs and acoustic stuff, it was more like "right, you can do this bit!"

What about the rhythm section?

"Robin Clayton on bass also plays with "Ran". He's a school of music graduate and is to say the least, adept! He plays a five string bass and is really good. On drums we had Zakk Starkey, Ringo's son who came in for us. Originally Nicko was going to do it but he had set a date to get married which happened to coincide with the first few weeks of us recording the album, so he couldn't do it. But it worked out really well with Zakk anyway."

Would the band which recorded the album be the band which went out live?

"Yeah, I think it would be great if we could use the same people. the nucleus of the band was me, Andy and Dave, the three guitarists plus the keyboard player Richard Young, who also contributed to the writing."

The arrangements of the songs are very rich in texture, how much input came form the band in tailoring the overall sound of the songs?

"We gave a lot of thought to those arrangements even to the point of changing them in the studio. That was one of the major differences with this project, everything was like a first time thing. In Maiden, you go in and you know exactly what you are going to do with your guitars, the sound, everything. With this we did more experimenting. There was never any danger of it ending up sounding like Maiden, because Maiden has such a distinctive style and sound that if you get a group of guys together, they are not naturally going to end up sounding like that. What we were doing was more or less the opposite end of the spectrum from Maiden as well, less progressive and more traditional verse-chorus-verse-chorus which I quite enjoy."

That was one of the sides to the album which I personally found very satisfying and refreshing. When I first heard about this project I thought "Oh, great, Iron Maiden guitarist, solo album, hours of widdly-widdly!" Adrian found this idea highly amusing and was evidently please that he had chosen to go down the route of good solid songs instead of epic indulgences. The songs themselves were an amalgam of the whole band's input.

"It's quite complicated really, because when we got together to do the album, I had about forty-five percent of the songs like "The Lion", "Silver and Gold", "After the Storm" and a couple of other ones off Side Two. The other guys had "Down the Wire", "Misunderstood", and a few other ideas. We ended up amalgamating different ideas we had and adding bits to each other's songs which is why we eventually decided to split everything. This way we could bounce ideas around together without worrying about who wrote what."

Did he ever consider what might happen if the album really takes off? How on earth would he support it as it's not really a full time band? A follow up album perhaps?

"I've never even thought of it like that. But it's a question which I've got to ask myself. What do I do if Maiden take another break? Record another A.S.a.P. record? Who knows? I'll take it one step at a time for the moment."

What about Iron Maiden, looking forward to getting back to work?

"Yeah, it'll be great, slippin' back into the machine!

Credits: http://www.oocities.org/~tkause/ftp-directory-maiden/interviews/Silver_And_Gold_interviews.txt

#AdrianSmith #ASAP #SILVERNADGOLD