The String’s The Thing
“I never thought of my own playing, and certainly not my singing, as being particularly brilliant.”
“Perfect timing!” says Anthony Phillips, on answering the phone to Prog. “I’ve got the tea bag out of the tea, I’ve got the olive oil off the nails – I’ll explain that later – and I’m ready to go.”
Phillips has just released Strings Of Light, a set of richly melodic solo guitar music, and his first new recorded work for seven years. The 24 tracks are almost entirely acoustic and range from ruminative still-lifes, to haunting, song-like vignettes, to elegantly structured creations, to dazzling exercises in finger picking. Most were written within the past few years, but a couple, Winter Lights and Shoreline, date back to just after he left Genesis in 1970.
When Phillips found out that he had amassed a total of just over 80 minutes of music, he was keen to make it a double-CD set, “rather than losing a couple, then cramming 75 minutes in and people falling asleep”. But on a is played on 18 different instruments, it offers constantly changing timbres, which Phillips – rightly – hopes will hold the listeners’ attention.
