AA, AMF, Tony Banks, JP, JH

St Clement Danes was another wonderful gig…rumoured to be our last, and almost certainly our last in the UK. So great to see Tony Banks whose songs are so magical, and Linda Hirst who sang with Red Byrd on the original recording of John Jones’ Amores Pasados.  Apologies to those who came to hear Sting’s Bury me Deep – it was just too high for me on the day so we slipped in Finisterre at the last moment. 

Alternative History has been like a family to me for the last fifteen years or so. The seeds were sown when Ariel invited me to do a concert with him in Spain and we discovered a mutual love of Josquin and Genesis. Our Josquin album was a formative experience, with Anna Maria Friman and Lee Santana. Jacob Heringman stepping in when Lee couldn’t make the last few sessions. The rest is Alternative History, and we went on to get songs from Tony Banks, Peter Erskine and Sting, and re-arranged John Paul Jones’ Amores Pasados for the four of us. We recorded the album at Rainbow Studios in Oslo, and Manfred Eicher danced around the room. 

Most of our concerts have been in Spain thanks to Ariel, and all of them have featured Jake’s unique and wonderful arrangements which he was often able to do on his long no-fly train journeys. An early agenda of the group was an assumption that everything would be treated as though we were late 16th/early 17th century musicians, doing what we could with whatever music we had. This led us to the early twentieth century songs of Warlock, Moeran and others, who might have set their 17th century texts to the lute had there been any lutenists around. Hence our alternative history of an early music movement that in a parallel universe began in the 1920s. 

In the present climate we think another album is unlikely, but we have plans to get together in Jerez to video some of our unrecorded material.