Tim Renwick – Pink Floyd

“I go way back with Floyd because I was at school in Cambridge – the Cambridgeshire County High School for Boys – with Storm Thorgersen, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters. In actual fact, Syd Barrett was my patrol leader in the school scout troop! I knew of Dave (Gilmour) as a guitarist very early on; he was in a band called Jokers Wild, who used to do all the university functions, May Balls and stuff like that. Dave was a bit of a hero of mine, in fact. I kept in touch with him through Willie Wilson who’s the drummer with The Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, a very good friend of his. Dave used to help out the Sutherlands quite a lot and we used his home studios to do demos on occasions and he produced a couple of B-sides for us. He used to come and jam with us but I’ve never actually worked with him in any other way as a formal second guitarist. I did do some odd bits for the Floyd and also there were a lot of other points of contact because the Sutherlands’ manager was Steve O’Rourke who manages Floyd, so he put us on shows with them as well. When they came to re-record some of the tracks for the film soundtrack of ‘The Wall’, Dave asked me to go in and play a couple of acoustic things… so yeah; we go back quite a long way.”

“I was quite surprised to be asked, in fact. At that time I didn’t really believe that the Floyd would be going back on the road – it had been seven years or something and there was all this pending legal stuff. So when David mentioned it to me I didn’t think I should take it seriously. Originally it was just going to be a tour of America, but the moment the tickets went on sale, three nights in Toronto sold out in a matter of hours and it just snowballed from there.”

Any show which involves so many ‘moving parts’ usually calls for some fairly intense production rehearsals, but in Floyd’s case…

“We had two weeks, although it was quite condensed. We were in a rehearsal studio in London where we had the whole backline set up as it would be on stage, essentially bashing through the set a couple of times and just working on little bits and pieces. In fact, the first week David was finishing off mixing ‘Division Bell’ anyway so I was given the job of MD. We had a long list of old stuff to go through as well as the new album, so when David turned up we could play something in excess of 30 songs.”

Darryl Stuermer – Genesis/Phil Collins

When guitarist Steve Hackett quit Genesis, the band took a rather unique way around the problem of replacing lost manpower by resolving to confine the writing and recording duties to the surviving three members and taking on ‘extra hands’ for live performance. Thus, Milwaukee-based guitarist Daryl Stuermer became a fully paid-up member of the Genesis live auxiliaries…

“Someone else who had auditioned for Genesis didn’t get it actually recommended me. So I got a call one day, saying they would fly me to New York and Mike Rutherford would audition me there.

They had sent me a tape of four songs; one was called Down And Out and Squonk was another. I just brought my guitar, played a couple of minutes of each song and Mike Rutherford said, ‘That will be fine. I think you’re the one.’ And I thought ‘I didn’t do anything!’

“He told me they had auditioned a lot of people back home and that they had five names in America that they were auditioning, and I was the first that day. He said, ‘I’ll give you a call at around 5 or 6 o’clock at your hotel… I just have to audition the other four, but I think you’re the one.’

“I think it was after we’d talked a bit and then played a bit our personalities seemed to go well together and our playing did as well. But I was very surprised. I had gone through auditions before and they were much tougher than that. But Mike is a very intuitive and instinctive person and I think that’s what he went on.”

“It was a world tour! When I auditioned with Mike, he gave me a list of twenty-five songs to work on and I thought I had to learn them all in five days, because we were starting rehearsals only a week later.

So I got back home and took five songs a day and learned them. I was frantically doing this and I showed up at rehearsal thinking they were going to do all the songs, but we didn’t do anything until two or three days later. It was mainly equipment setting up, and then when we did rehearse we only did a couple of songs a day.”

“We rehearsed in England for three weeks and then flew to Houston, Texas, and rehearsed in the Goodyear Blimp hangar, because the screens the band use are so huge that we had to find a place big enough hold them. We rehearsed there for about two weeks – it was about 90 degrees in there.”

David Rhodes – Peter Gabriel’s Band

“In my last year at college I met up with a guy who was an English teacher and we decided to do this kind of ‘noise’ group, with tape machines and me scratching away at a guitar and him playing Stylophone. We did a series of performances at a theatre in Rotherhithe and only twenty-four people came, so it was then that we decided to do songs! So we started using backing tapes – we were amongst the first to be doing that, I think. But we were a lot more rock’n’roll than electronic, so we kind of missed out.”

“That would be ‘79. We were using the old Roland rhythm machines, using Latin rhythms, that kind of thing…”

“I was trying to play guitar,” he jests. “I had a Strat for a little while, then I had to sell it.”

“We were called Random Hold. We were good at something – I’m not sure exactly what. It was quite crude, but there was some nice stuff – really effective. It was very intense, what we did, and consequently nobody bought the record when it came out.”

“Yes. He came to see the band down at the Rock Garden, along with all of his management people. By the time Peter saw us, we were just a kind of straight-ahead band. He’d been recommended by a painter called Graham Dean who’d seen us a couple of times up in Oxford.

Peter was looking for a band to work with for the third album. His first record had been made with American session players and the second one was pretty much with his live band with a couple of additions.

He came and saw us then invited us to go and do some demos with him. I was so nervous – I had tummy ache for the three or four days that we were there. I just ate mushy bananas and yoghurt.”

“No, but it stopped me from dying of belly-ache…”

“Pathetic! The funny thing was when we went down there I think Peter was twenty-eight and I must have been twenty-two, and I thought, ‘What’s this old geezer trying to do?’ And it’s funny… we’re still at it.”

“Yes, but I was never a Genesis fan. I once had a girlfriend who forced me to listen to ‘Foxtrot’, and the only track I liked on that was called Armageddon In 5/4 (in fact, Apocalypse In 9/8 – DM). Peter asked me at one time if I ever listened to Genesis, and I said no, but the only track I ever liked was this thing in 7/4, and I think it was the only track on that record that he didn’t like!”