A Spring In His Step
Peter Jones has been making elegant sounds as Tiger Moth Tales for almost a full decade, but on his sixth album, he’s decided to go back to basics with a more of a traditional prog rock approach. Here, he discusses the upbeat A Song Of Spring, the perils of setting tight deadlines, and what lies ahead for Camel.
Words: Rich Wilson
Tiger Moth Tales’ Peter Jones taps into spring.
Images: Rob Reed
Peter Jones is a self-confessed musical hoarder. Writing his own music since the age of 10, the multi-talented Tiger Moth Tales leader has religiously stored away recordings of those tentative sound experiments and will occasionally revisit them for inspiration when cursed with occasional bouts of writer’s block.
“There are tracks on this album that have parts on them which are quite old,” he explains. “I used to try and write prog when I was really young and in my early teens. I’ve still got a lot of that stuff and I quite often call upon that if I’m struggling for a bit of inspiration. Even going back as far as being seven or eight I would literally just sit at the piano and just improvise for 10 minutes. I would get to the end of it and think, ‘There’s a song.’ I mean some of it was pretty awful and those tracks will never see the light of day. I never throw anything away so sometimes I can get inspired by something which I probably wrote about 30 years ago.”
Formed in 2013, with debut album Cocoon appearing a year later, Tiger Moth Tales is essentially a solo project, with Jones responsible for writing and performing the material. This latest release, A Song Of Spring, follows on from 2020’s Still Alive, an album that generally took a more stripped-back, song-oriented approach. Although generally welcomed by his fanbase, Jones is aware that the stylistic alteration may have alarmed some of his listeners. Indeed, in the accompanying press release for this latest album, Jones refers to A Song Of Spring as being a return to form, perhaps openly admitting a lack of satisfaction with its predecessor.