The vast majority of people would do anything for an easy life. Bruce Soord, frontman and founder of progressive rock powerhouse The Pineapple Thief, is not one of them. The band recently completed their fourteenth studio album, It Leads To This, a wonderfully complex, thought-provoking and atmospheric work. And while drummer Gavin Harrison’s response to finishing it is to be simply “relieved”, it’s dawning on Soord that he now needs to learn how to play these intricate songs live for The Pineapple Thief’s upcoming shows.
“I’m normally the least rehearsed one and I get into a lot of trouble,” he says. “Especially with the guitars, because I tune them into weird tunings, and I play them once. Then a year or two years later I’m like: ‘How did I do that?’ Then it’s like learning it from scratch again.”
It’s little wonder that it’s such a big task. had a long gestation period, the lockdown of 2020 providing the luxury of time in which to write, with no other work commitments. By the time life started to resemble normality again,
