Martin Briley

Thanks to the efforts of Richard Elen in England, I have recently been reunited with an excellent digital copy of the instrumental album 'The River' that I originally recorded for Island Records in London in 1976. The album was never released but will possibly see the light of day in 2007. The album was recorded at the request of Chris Blackwell himself, because at that time Island Records distributed Virgin Records who, with their massive hit 'Tubular Bells' were outselling everything on the parent label. Chris Blackwell hoped for a similar success of his own with 'The River', however, 1976 saw the advent of punk rock and the project was shelved. Concept albums had been quite popular in the seventies, unfortunately the trend was dominated by things like Rick Wakeman's 'Six Wives of Henry VIII'. A piece with ( guess what? ) SIX movements! To continue this absurdity I momentarily considered writing 'The Foot', a piece with five movements, one for each toe. Beginning with the little toe ( a scherzo ) and ending with the big toe ( grand finale ) and with each movement linked by a recurring theme representing the gap between the toes. Instead I settled on 'The River' as a concept. A river is a big thing containing many smaller things that are all very different from one another. A river starts small and ends big. A river is made of water, elemental and infinite. The element of water itself is represented by a five note motif that appears throughout the album. The album was produced by the late Andrew Pryce Jackman, my friend and mentor. Andrew also produced Chris Squire's 'Fish Out of Water' and then went on to become a critically-acclaimed contemporary classical composer and to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra on many highly successful recordings. The album was engineered by George Chkiantz.