Dangerous Ideas
Gazpacho’s Thomas Andersen takes Prog on a journey to the centre of the mind in search of an entity that lurks there, poised to take control. It’s a whistle-stop tour through the genesis of Fireworker, taking in the radioactive footsteps of Marie Curie, ideas that can kill, and Andersen’s fascinating creative process.
Words: David West Images: Nina Krømer
“It’s a difficult album to get into. It doesn’t welcome you with open arms but when you get there, I think it can be worth it,” declares Thomas Andersen on the subject of Fireworker, the new release from Norway’s Gazpacho. He’s talking to Prog from his home studio south of Oslo where we can spot a 1968 Moog and a signed Bruford Anderson Wakeman Howe T-shirt. When not working on Gazpacho’s latest opus, Andersen has been enjoying Rick Wakeman’s autobiography (his childhood hero) and it becomes clear that he’s a widely read man. The original plan for the new album was a concept based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Little Eyolf, about a couple whose baby is left handicapped after he falls off a table while they’re having sex. “The play is about how they fight because they now hate each other, they blame each other for the injury of the boy,” says Andersen. “It’s a fantastic psychological play on how we hate our partners. But then we felt we couldn’t really improve on what was essentially a perfect psychological play, but there was still something about how instinct was involved there somewhere.”