AV:  At 17 you were already composing music and setting your musical career on course with your first album Ascension. Where did this love of music and this desire to be a musician come from at such a young age? 

CW:  My passion for music was initially sparked by overhearing Tubular Bells playing in my mother’s workroom (she was a dressmaker) when I was just a child, and also from my father demonstrating the wonders of his Quadraphonic hi-fi stereo by playing his LP of Oxygene. Sure enough, both of these early musical moments planted their seeds, but in actuality it was probably the years I spent aimlessly noodling about on the family piano that led to my first actual tunes emerging, which ultimately became some of the tracks on Ascension, and some of the other albums I released in the 80’s (including Legacy, The Speed of Sound and Ionospheres). However, I must admit that I didn’t specifically have an intention to become a musical artist. I just loved those sounds! And I wanted to create my own, so I arm-twisted a few friends to buy some early bits of gear and we formed a couple of experimental music groups. And they were pretty experimental I can tell you! I still have a few cassettes of our early attempts, and some of them aren’t that bad! Relatively cheap recording equipment was just starting to appear on the market, so it was a great time to get started. At any rate, I believe my music career was born out of my passion to explore sound, rather than music itself.

AV:  Once Ascension was finished and was released what were your thoughts as to what your next musical step would be and how did you take that next step and the many subsequent steps that followed after that with each new album? Were you setting your course or was the creativity and the momentum of the first album pulling you along? 

CW:  Actually, I am sad to say my experience post Ascension was not good at all, as I made the mistake of selling all of my future royalties back to the record label for five years, in return for a slightly bigger advance (so I could buy another keyboard). That one decision probably altered the course of my life, as I struggled in near-abject poverty for more than five years whilst the album sold world-wide.

 

Cliff's first studio set up

In addition to the lack of funds, the record company didn’t forward any fan mail to me either, so I ended up feeling totally disconnected from my first album creation for a very long time afterwards. Saying that, this thankfully didn’t stem the flow of creative ideas. After all, I did have an 8 track studio, and when sampling kicked-off in the early 80’s I got massively into that, which led to my second album ‘Spring Fantasy’. 

Obviously, each album has its own story, which would be too long to go into here, but in general my process is usually either (a) come up with a really good album concept and see if I have any tracks that fit it, or almost fit it, or see if I can come up with something that does or (b) listen through to the tracks/ideas I already have and see if I can fit a concept to it, or make changes to them so that the concept fits. So there’s usually a concept somewhere at the heart of it!  

Following that, I know there is going to be a period of hard work, so I treat it as such, setting myself goals (which are constantly broken) and deadlines (that are continually exceeded) until I reach what I would call ‘the point of no return’, a kind of mystical place where I know for certain that the album is going to get finished! From there, it’s a little like riding downhill, with a rather unpleasant bit at the end where the bike gets stuck and you have to walk the rest of the way, hot, exhausted and ready for a nap! I’ve done fifteen albums now, and the experience is usually much the same. Still, at the end of the day, it’s immensely satisfying to complete an album and sit back and enjoy it, especially on a nice pair of headphones within a few feet of a wide rolling ocean!

AV:  While music is a large portion of your output you have many irons in the fire when it comes to career paths. Perhaps you can enlighten our readers as to what else you are involved with in the digital world other than the music which is oftentimes front and center?

CW:  Well, everyone has to pay the bills don’t they? Making a living full-time out of music is a very tough call, and as I wanted to continue to work within a genre of music that is hardly pop-charting material, I realized that I had two choices – ether ‘sell out’ and write pop music, or develop another career alongside music. I must admit that I did (albeit half-heartedly) try selling out, but it didn’t last long as I quickly realized that I really wasn’t cut out for pop music, and film music generally tends to be scary or dramatic rather than uplifting and spiritual, so that was me out again. Ultimately, breaking off into another career seemed like a sensible choice, and as I was already fairly familiar with computers (I had an Atari ST running my sequences in the studio for a while) I commandeered the computer and started a web design business. This grew into a much larger business, eventually relocating to Elstree Film Studios where I had nine staff members producing websites for a variety of companies. That in turn evolved into a training business, where we taught companies of all sizes how to create and market their websites, and that version of the business went great guns until the recession kicked in around 2009 and we almost lost everything. Nowadays I still teach and build websites, but on a more limited basis. As far as I am concerned, music is my path from hereon in!

AV:  The albums are entitled Waterworld, The Speed of Silence, Robot Dawn and Cityscape. Tell me a little about the concept/title behind each album and what threads they have in common and how they support and extend one another working in conjunction with one another.

CW:  Well, I’d like to claim that the whole thing was intentional, but it wasn’t really. As I was working on the tracks, they started to flow together into groups, and as I already knew I wanted to open on a gentle note with some Oxygene/Equinoxe type stuff that I had, that leant itself ideally to the ‘Waterworld’ theme, and from thereon I could build up the beats through the series whilst aiming to end on a high-note. I also had a collection of ‘robot stuff’ that I had written over the years which had never seen the light of day, so the SYNERGY series seemed like an ideal home for that concept. Plus there were a plethora of other funky/dancy electronic tracks that would fit the series as well, so I had those on the back-burner. In the end, it proved to be a major juggling act to work out what track was going to go where, and I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the flow right between tracks and albums. I had also set myself two goals: each album should have one more track than the previous one, and each album should be over 70 minutes, all of which I finally managed to achieve, with a fair amount of blood, sweat and tears! Mainly because, at the end of the day, I really do like to give people value for money!

Cliff is the proud father of these 4 newly released albums

 

AV:  Now that the albums are all released how do you feel about the finished material? Were you happy with how all of the compositions on four separate albums flowed together and flowed separately?

CW:  Yes, I am really pleased with the result. I would say that I am 98% satisfied with the whole album set. Upon reflection, there are a few odd places I would add an extra sound or two - a drum roll here, the odd second melody line there, but they would mostly be tweaks and minor improvements that quite honestly no-one other than me is ever going to notice, so it doesn’t worry me too much! Some years ago I addressed within myself this idea of perfection: I had always strived to make my tracks as perfect as possible, often spending weeks honing and crafting sounds to get as close to the ‘ideal’ as I possibly could. Whilst that process was educational, it was both time-consuming and tiring. Then a couple of years ago I reasoned with myself that ‘things do not have to be perfect’, and that idea became a revelation to me, along with this idea of ‘embracing imperfection’ and finally ‘perfect imperfection’. Obviously, a lot more could be said about these ideas, but the bottom line is: ‘our universe and our lives are not perfect, so why should our music have to be?’, along with ‘music is more fun and spontaneous if it has some human imperfections sprinkled into it!’ The idea of imperfections, and of accepting them (and even welcoming them) into my music really opened up a whole new way of working for me, allowing me to finish my tracks much more quickly. I mean, at the end of the day, who really cares if I used cymbal X or cymbal Y at the end of the track? Who is really going to notice?

AV:  Do you think you’ll ever attempt this again in the future if your creativity demands that this much music be released at once?

CW:  That’s an ironic question because next year I am planning to finish another four volume epic series entitled ‘The Beach’, which I plan to release in 2021. As with the SYNERGY series, The Beach is a collection of fresh new ‘Chill-out’ beach music that I have been working on for a few years. And that’s not the only set I have planned either. In fact, as I mentioned before, my workload is 4,2,4,2,3,2,3 so that’s going to keep me busy for a while! On top of all that, I am a bit worried about what I am going to do with the extra few albums that have recently crept into the
list….!!!