ARainbow In Curved Air is the fundamental backbone of my whole cultural life. I went to primary school in Gloucestershire and had this extraordinary, cool old hippie music teacher called Mr Edmonds. His idea of a good music lesson was to take the whole class into the hall, sit us down and play either The Dark Side Of The Moon or A Rainbow In Curved Air at ear-bleeding volume. When the record finished, he’d say, ‘That’s it, see you next week’. I spent the best part of a year listening to it and it changed everything, I learnt so much. I didn’t know about overdubbing or minimalism, all I knew is that Terry Riley had done everything on it.
I was a basic organ player already and it blew my tiny mind. I was a choir boy, learning a lot of religious music, which is all goal-oriented, and you can say that of most rock ’n’ roll, too. Everything is leading you from point A to B to C to D. This was a new world order, because it’s all based on one chord. A Major was always bright yellow for me in those days, I used to associate keys with colours, so I had this whole 25-minute piece in yellow but without for one second becoming monotonous.
The connection was totally immediate and it became my most rampant desire to own a Hammond organ. It began a lifelong quest to burrow in deep to the eternal now; it had a direct impact on my own musical development. At the age of nine or 10, I was a rampant improviser and remember doing these longform improvisations in church, all based around one tonality, just as Terry Riley tells you in A Rainbow In Curved Air. It was unlike anything anyone else was playing in church at that time. I think most people probably thought I was a bit mad… I probably was.