Trevor Tanner, Sunday, November 13, 2022
I’ve been hearing that my whole life and it still sounds like bullshit to me.
“Oh you’re ahead of your time, oh people don’t understand, oh dear when will they get the message” etc etc.
The message is that I’ve always been on the outside or the fringe of things and as a musician that is not a good place to be, or is it?
I’ve always been a believer in be true to yourself and the rest will follow, well I’ve always been true to myself and the rest has followed, not always in an ideal fashion but nonetheless pretty predictable.
To be honest in the early days of the Bolshoi we were a three-piece and then I got fed up trying to fill up all the space and we got a keyboard player, Paul Clark from Leeds, he wore a baseball jacket and we weren’t sure if he was right for us at all, but guess what, he fitted right in and we became best friends unless or because we were drinking, which was every night in those days.
We tried our best to take our music around the world and let people hear us, with varying degrees of success, which is understandable given the circumstances.
When we called it quits we all stayed friends and we all moved apart which is an inevitable part of growth, for my part I stayed in touch with Paul because he and I have many things in common and had remained friends after the demise of the Bolshoi.
Fast track to 2018 and we decided that we would try and do some music together, which was a bit problematic due to the geographical chasm between us and my ineptitude at using any kind of computer recording system, cue the pandemic and everything changed.
The panic and frightening reality of impending death pretty much sped up my songwriting process and I learned to use the computer to make music long-distance and otherwise. Paul and myself started to collaborate on some pretty interesting music and with his help I was able to use the computer to communicate musically with my friend some five thousand miles away.
I’m not really interested in nostalgia and whilst I’m not ashamed of what I did in the Bolshoi I don’t really care about it these days, but I know we had some good songs.
With this in mind Paul and myself set out to create some new classics and I think we have actually. If you don’t agree that’s great, but I don’t really care either way, I never did.
I have been playing guitar and singing my whole life and I have been lucky enough to have made my living as a musician which is a rare thing apparently.
A few years ago I received some really great advice from the late great Les Paul, he crossed my hands with a very firm old man’s grip and told me “If you have a guitar in your hand and you’re making a fucking dollar you are a mother-fucking professional guitar player” and I have lived by that ever since.
I am very excited and surprised by the music that Paul and I have made together, and I hope that other people enjoy it too. There are always critics and naysayers , but I will always be up for the challenge of trying, I am a musician after all!
The Bolshoi Brothers is not an exercise in nostalgia, it is a genuine collaboration with a nod to our past but a definite step forward in these mental times.
I’m not afraid…
Trevor Tanner