CJJC
Group: Members
Posts: 210
Joined: Aug. 2010 |
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Posted: Aug. 21 2012, 08:00 |
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Quote | My then tour manager, Alan Hornshall, mentioned a gifted drummer called Simon Phillips to me. I met Simon and he came down to see me and we got on well. He offered to assist in the production of the Crises album and we gathered together some musicians, as I had done with Guilty, and from those sessions came Moonlight Shadow and Shadow on the Wall.
In the song Moonlight Shadow we had created this fantastic backing track, but then I had the problem of deciding what should be done with it. I spent three months trying our different things. Hazel O'Connor came in to the studio to do a version, called Moment of Passion, but that didn't seem to work. After tearing my hair out for some time deciding what to do with the track, I decided to book Maggie Reilly for a session the following day and that night, I sat down with a very nice bottle of Bordeaux and my rhyming dictionary and spent the night writing the lyrics. Maggie came in and started singing the lyrics in a rock style and I asked her to sing more in the manner of a lullaby as softly as possible. It took some time to get things right and to achieve the lovely closeness of a sound of someone almost whispering in your ear. We virtually recorded the vocal track syllable by syllable and we did a great deal of drop-ins. It took a few days to mix it and it was quite a task. Looking back, I think [it] was very much worth it. It became a huge hit and was number one throughout Europe. Roger Chapman was fantastic on the track Shadow on the Wall. Back in 1969, I went for an audition with Family as their bass player. When Ric Grech had left the band to join Blind Faith, I turned up at the Country Club in Hampstead and Roger listened to my playing and saw some promise in me. The other members of the band weren't interested in me joining the band, but Roger and I had some connection. When I wrote Shadow on the Wall I thought of Roger as the singer. He was a tough, but lovely man and did a great job. |
-------------- IMHO
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