Comprising former members of IQ and Frost*, Rain have approached the challenges of creating their “difficult” second album with both passion and flair. But, as drummer Andy Edwards and keyboard player Rob Groucutt reveal, Radio Silence wasn’t without its stressors and things could have been very different had their 2020 debut not been so well accepted…

Words: Rich Wilson Images: Dylan Dudley

Rain are on a mission to become the sort of band “the prog scene needs”.

Andy Edwards is the type of person who could engage in a lively debate on the virtues of prog for several hours. Indeed, it’s those opinions that have shaped the content of his burgeoning YouTube channel, and while delving into that would be an intriguing conversation, it’s Rain’s Radio Silence that’s our current focus. The album is the follow-up to their debut, Singularity, a recording that, despite being somewhat tricky to categorise, appealed to a significant number of fans, as Edwards explains.

“We felt that we’d delivered a real full-on prog album with songs about magicians with odd time signatures and with a conceptual continuity,” he says. “When it came out, I think a lot of people found it hard to pigeonhole the sound of it and that’s something that has stuck with us ever since. The prog fans love it. I have worked with Rob Groucutt [keyboards, vocals] on different prog projects. We talked about having this prog band for about 10 years and pulling in a whole host of influences. So, we went back to doing what they did in the 70s, which was to bring in bits of jazz fusion, bits of funk but also vocal harmonies and pop elements. It was having your cake and eating it, which is what I think prog is. People really liked that album because they hadn’t heard it done in that way for a while. There’s no point in doing it if you aren’t doing something original.