NICK BARRETT
On Who Really Are We?, the penultimate track of Pendragon’s new album Love Over Fear, Nick Barrett sings, ‘To my mind it’s a miracle we got this far.’ He’s talking primarily about the human race and humanity’s capacity to be its own worst enemy. But it could also apply to Pendragon themselves – a band that formed at the height of punk’s popularity (and the beginning of prog’s long residency as the love that dared not speak its name), who missed out on the success and profile the neo-prog scene promised. The band also had to deal with poverty, bitter divorce, label and management turmoil, and see-sawing fortunes as well as the regulation line-up changes, yet they managed to hold their own creatively and commercially. Still retaining a strong following abroad, Pendragon endure, with last year’s belated box set, The First 40 Years, offering a part-live, part-remixed collection of songs from their preceding 10 albums.
Barrett recently relocated to the coast of Cornwall near Bude, where he and his girlfriend Rachel run a small but highly rated B&B, The Barn (“surfers and bikers especially welcome”), which benefits from stunning views of the countryside and out to sea at Widemouth Bay.
Those new surroundings seem to have had a strong influence on Love Over Fear, which is quite often effusive about the revitalising effects of being closer to nature.
“Peter [Gee], our bass player, said, ‘You can almost feel the sea’,” Barrett reveals, “and I definitely think the album has an uplifting feel. There is of course some darker underlying stuff, but overall it’s got a more uplifting feel.”
That’s certainly true, from the upbeat rhythm that opens the set with to the Waterboys-esque folk-rock of , in which he asserts ‘’ and ‘’. On , the keen surfer also writes’
