Back To The Future
In 2021, Magenta’s Rob Reed relaunched his old band, Cyan, with a new line-up and a polished reimagining of For King And Country. They’ve now teamed up again to tackle Pictures From The Other Side. Reed and vocalist Peter Jones tell Prog about bringing a new lease of life to old material and why there’s more to come.
Words: Chris Cope Portrait: Chris Jones
“In my head I wanted to be in Genesis, I wanted to be in It Bites. I was living the dream as a teenager and there was no second-guessing what I was going to write. So, there’s a lovely innocence with these tracks.”
Rob Reed
The ever-evolving Cyan. L-R: Luke Machin, Rob Reed, Jiffy Griffiths, Peter Jones, Dan Nelson.
"I
knew the songs were good back in
the day,” Cyan mainman Rob Reed
says of his band’s original releases,
from back in the 1990s. “But they
just needed to be reworked. A lot
of people would go back and remix the
album or tinker with it, but this is
a major rebuilding, throwing out
sections and writing new ones. Some
of the tracks are unrecognisable, some
less so. I just enjoy fixing things, and
hearing them with the full production.”
Reed is speaking down the phone from his studio in Wales on the cusp of Cyan’s latest release, a reworking of their 1994 album Pictures From The Other Side. The premise is fairly simple: with a new line-up, let’s rearrange, reimagine and rework the album, and record it on much better gear.
Reed and co already gave Cyan’s 1993 debut, For King And Country, a 21st-century makeover a few years ago, and they’ve decided it’s now time to have a bash at their follow-up record. It smacks of a job-well-done, with the album’s evolution fascinating to see. After three records in the 90s, the multiinstrumentalist stopped Cyan and locked it away in the filing cabinet while reaching to the stars with his ongoing project, Magenta.