Originally released in 2002, Big Big Train’s Bard should have been their final album. Founder bassist Greg Spawton’s personal life was in pieces and so was the band’s line-up, but fate had other plans. As the long-deleted record is finally reissued, Spawton and former vocalist Andy Poole discuss their love-hate relationship with the music that was written during one of BBT’s most challenging periods.

Words: Grant Moon

The Big Big Train Founders Club, reunited at Throop Mill, Dorset.

Portrait: Wlady Porczynska

“The reconnection with Andy and Ian has been one of the nicest things to come out of this. Andy, especially, has been highly engaged – this would not have happened without him. And the timing feels right.”

Greg Spawton

On Big Big Train’s tour last year, one of the main musical highlights was the deepest cut on the setlist. Long, proggy and drawing on founder member Gregory Spawton’s passion for history, The Last English King preceded the work of the band’s current iteration, dating back even before the tenure of their much-missed frontman, David Longdon.

The song was from their third album, Bard, in 2002, when the acclaim and prestige BBT now enjoy seemed light years away. They had already been going for 12 years by then, and – with disillusionment setting in –the record was going to be their last hurrah. At this point the band were effectively a duo: Spawton and co-founder Andy Poole, with a loose musical collective around them.

The reissue of Bard is out now.

ALL IMAGES ON THIS DPS:BBT ARCHIVE

Poole left the ranks in 2018 but has played a crucial role in the new, limited-edition reissue of this storied album. A keen adopter of music editing software Pro Tools, he was Bard’s de facto producer, and it’s from his archive of material that BBT’s trusted studio/live engineer Rob Aubrey has remixed and remastered the record, buffing it up from its original parts.