home back to interviews	I HAD A DREAM! Clive Nolan and Mick Pointer – 2 june 2007
	When Arena where in Holland for their “in between albums” tour, we had a talk with Mick and Clive about all that’s going on inside and outside the cage. A WELL-DESERVED BREAK After the Pepper’s Ghost tour, you made a decision to take a break and take your time for the next album. Clive: The main thing was, after the Pepper’s Ghost tour - particularly Mick and me, we had been we had been working on this from day one - it came to the point where we really needed to take a step back from it all otherwise it was just going to “implode”. It was a good tour, but there was a certain kind of stress about it, certainly from my perspective, and I personally really wanted to step away from it. I don’t believe in leaving bands, I don’t believe in splitting up. You just have to be strategic about how you go about things. I think for the health of Arena we just needed to take a break, it was as simple as that. Mick: I think everybody gets fed up whoever they’re with at some point, regardless how long they have been married for example or whatever their relationship may be. Once you’ve finished a tour and an album of the size we did, you just need to say “that’s enough for the moment”. The album came out early January 2005 and our last live date was in Canada in November. That’s enough really, that’s a lot of organising. People generally just get fed up with what they’re doing. It’s very difficult to keep that same momentum. You see the difference with this tour, when we’re together now we’re actually… Clive: We’re actually enjoying ourselves again! It was a positive surprise, everybody was a bit tentative about it when we first got back together, but it’s really the most positive mindset of people that we’ve had in five or six years. Mick: The rehearsal for this tour was the first time we’ve been together in the same room since a year and a half. We all see each other occasionally, individually or with another one of us there, but all five of us together… Clive: I hadn’t seen Ian since we came back from Canada! And I don’t think I’ve seen Rob. I saw John once and I’ve seen you a few times. We just took a break. And it’s better to take a break than to run off with another band. There have been some rumours that you had split up… [Silhobbit magazine announced this but rectified it soon afterwards – eds.] Clive: Yeah, I know. I think if we had kept going, if we hadn’t taken the break, that’s entirely what could have happened. There would have been too much tension. We needed to step away from it. It’s a good thing, because until this tour I haven’t been wanting to even think about writing another Arena album and now I’m interested again in going on with it. ALBUM NUMBER SEVEN So is there any writing going on now? Clive: The truth of the matter is we haven’t really started writing the next album [writing has begun now – eds.], but what has happened, and what I’m kind of excited about, is that I had this dream and it’s the concept of the new album. I woke up after the dream and thought: now that is a new Arena album! It’s a very dark theme, it’s very Arena. It’s like someone put this idea in my head while I was asleep because he or she thought that is what Arena should be doing and it is, it’s exactly right. It’s got all the elements, it’s got murder, revenge, hopes and failures and all the rest of it. It’s got a slightly historical angle as well. Part of me actually wanted to continue the Pepper’s Ghost theme, because I love that, but you can’t, you can’t just cling on, you have to move on. But now that we’ve got the concept, it’s a lot easier to write the music. Mick: We have been very encouraged by the reactions of the crowds. Our audiences are up and everybody really worried whether we’d come back ever again. That has been very encouraging. I think maybe it was a good idea to give the audience a bit of a break as well to be honest with you. Nobody realises how much they miss you until you’ve gone. And here we are! Clive: You’ll regret it when we’re gone! [laughs] It’s true, we’ve been surprised by the number of people that have turned up for these gigs and we’re not promoting anything. It’s been great, really good. John and Clive have been and are busy with various other bands and projects. Will this influence the music Arena is going to make? Clive: No, I don’t think there’s so much of an influence from those bands. I guess, from our point of view, it’s just given us a holiday from Arena. Mick has been doing his “Script For A Jester’s Pointer” [laughs]. I’ve been busy with Pendragon obviously, who have been a lot more active recently. I could put time into that. It’s good to see Pendragon doing stuff again and building up the audience. There have been some four years in which they have been lying low. CAAMORA AND MICK’S SCRIPT Clive: Then there’s Caamora that I’ve been working on, the rock opera thing, which is now kind of starting to come to fruition. It’s been two years of preparation, writing, demos and all the rest of it, going out and doing piano and voice gigs. We’ve just come back from South America a few days before the Arena tour. It’s been quietly building. I’ve never expected it to be a big explosion. We’ll be recording the album over the summer, the DVD will be recorded at the end of October and the whole lot will come out in January, that’s the theory. I don’t know what will happen next as far as that’s concerned. The purpose of that was pretty much to write a rock opera. So that’ll be it, then it will have achieved what it was supposed to set out for. It’s going very well, but it’s a tremendous amount of work. A lot more then I ever expected when I started to work on it and there’s still a lot to do. I’ve got three months to put an album of two hours of music together. That’s a lot of work coming up, starting next Monday, in fact. So that has been keeping me busy. A good thing about Caamora is that I’m pretty much in charge and can make my own decisions. Obviously, when you’re in a band, it’s a different process. But it’s nice to come back to the band now. So the break has worked well. John has been doing all the things he does and Mick has been doing his “Script For A Pointer’s Tear” [laughs]. We all have had things to keep us occupied . There’s a certain sanity about Arena that makes more sense when you walk away from it. Mick: I do hope to tour Script For A Jester’s Tear next February. Then it’s 25 years since the release of that album. That’s the general plan. It came about because every time I do a gig, wherever it is and how many people there are, there’s always someone with a Scipt For A Jester’s Tear LP of CD or something he wants me to sign and… Clive: You thought: there’s a gap in the market! [laughs] Mick: Yeah, there’s a gap in the market there! [laughs] Also, Fish has been doing this Misplaced Childhood tour. Clive: And now he’s doing Clutching At Straws. Mick: So I thought: it’s a possibility and I approached a few guys, amongst them Nick Barrett, Ian, Mike Varty and a vocalist who’s in a band called Jump and we performed the album, Script, in small place in Swindon [the Riffs Bar – eds.]. That went down fantastically well. We need to recreate that tour as it was 25 years ago, there’s no point in just getting a bunch of guys playing those songs. So I hope that we have found someone who will fit the bill vocally. So it’s all in place basically. We’re just going to make sure over the summer that this vocalist is the right one. CONTAGION MAX Let’s move over to another long awaited subject, the new fan club album… Clive: Contagion Max! Yeah, that’s a tough one, isn’t it. Well, the difficulty is that every day that I get up and do whatever I do, it’s never been top of the list of the things I need to get done. I know perhaps that doesn’t seem very good. A combination of things has to happen to make this album complete. I don’t know about the artwork, but for my end of things, basically I need time in the studio with Karl [Groom – eds.] to remaster it, put the tracks all together, put them in the right order. It’s about four hours work. But the problem is that Karl is busy in the studio with hundreds of bands, if he’s not then I’m busy with hundreds of bands and if we’re both not then we’re not there. So it’s difficult. In theory Karl does have all the material now, he’s got the compilation of all the tracks. I did get that far and I said that we must get together to get this done. It’s just one of those things that not actually come to fruition. And even if I do come up with the master, I don’t know if there’s any artwork done or anything like that. So there are more elements that have to be completed to make it happen. I never really thought that people were overtly bothered about it… Well they are! Just read the posts on the forum; The Cage has also received many inquiring e-mails. Mick: How many people are we talking about, effectively? Clive: Yeah, how many could we sell? Probably quite a lot once it’s there. Mick: A few things will be changing within the organisation [of Verglas – eds.] over the next year, in terms of products and so on, so maybe we can incorporate it in that. Clive: If the fans are really desperate for Contagion Max then I’m sure at some point it will happen, but they are just going to have to bear with us. There’s a load of things that need to change. We have to sort ourselves out a little bit. We need a process by which we will bring the next album out and everything that goes with that, from websites to fanclubs to extra albums and everything. We’re thinking and talking about changing the whole process a little bit. Once we emerge with a new plan then I’m sure that Contagion Max can be part of that plan. Hopefully we can sort something out. MUSIC VERSUS BUSINESS Mick: A big problem is that there are a lot of people that like to download stuff these days and it does make life as a record label increasingly more difficult. I don’t want to get into that whole nest of vipers [laughs], the rights and wrongs of downloading stuff, but it does have an impact on the artists, particularly artists that live and breathe by their record label. It’s just a simple fact of life that we if we don’t have the back up of that [the album sales – eds.] we wouldn’t be doing this [touring – eds.]. We’d be turning up in an old van… The financial reality of things is that you have to generate money to keep things going. I know a lot of people don’t like to think about that when you become an artist, you do it purely for the stream of creativity, but there’s also a financial side to it. Clive: It is a problem, as we’re both trying to be the artist and the business. It’s hard to focus on both and it’s two different perspectives. When I think about things like “would you like to play such and such a concert” my instinct initially is “yes, I do want to play it.” A business man wouldn’t think that, he would think “how much is it worth, how much does it cost, what’s the profit – no, we won’t bother.” As an artist, our purpose is to play and be heard by people. So we’re always at a disadvantage from a business point of view, because we want to do it and therefore we try to make it work. If we just thought from a business point of view we wouldn’t do half the things we do. That would be a shame as well. When you do original music, that’s the tough part of it. Mick: Nobody realises how much it actually costs to heat our swimming pools here in England… Clive: Good God, yes! Mick: It’s unbelievably expensive, somebody’s got to pay for it, Clive! And the villa in Barbados doesn’t run itself! [laughs] FUTURE PLANS So to wrap it up, what are your plans, what can the fans expect? Clive: Well, the plan is, the next job is to write. There’s no point in us continually going on tour without a new product, so we need a new album. We have a concept for it, it’s definitely already got a “flavour”. I guess over the next year that album will be written. And I say that because obviously we all have various other things that now need to be completed. In and around that the album will hopefully come together, then obviously we’ll record it and then there will be a new tour. At that point, as I said, also a whole new style of organisation, of how we go about things. It will be good, from a fans point of view it will end up very beneficial. I’m sure it will be better. There may be more products available; we’re thinking of taking control of these bootlegs a bit – bringing out official bootlegs so that you can actually make sure that they are good quality, master them and make them sound decent, whilst still selling them cheaply. If someone’s going to pay for an Arena product, I’d much rather have that the money came to us. And obviously, once we’re out on tour again, hopefully we’ll come out and do a lot more concerts and reach out as far around the world as we possibly can. We haven’t talked about the stage show or anything, but there’s two possibilities: bigger and better then before or possibly smaller, as in more intimate, I don’t know yet. A final word to the fans? Clive: Be patient with us, there will be a new album and hopefully it will be the best thing we’ve done so far and… who knows, it might even be the same line up! We keep setting new records [laughs]. Stick with us and spread the word: Arena will be back with a new album! And a tour! And they should learn the lyrics a bit more as well. I’d like to see them singing the lyrics at the front. I remember one of the best gigs for me, one of the best moments of my musical career as they say, it was possibly our first full band gig, at the Tivoli [Utrecht, Holland, 5 April 1996 – eds.], we played Solomon and the front rows were singing along and I thought “they’re singing my lyrics, that’s great!” That was just a really good feeling, I remember that. I love it when I see people singing the lyrics, it means they have really listened to the songs. So more of that please! By: Hanneke Beers & Erik Beers