Earth Mann

Melody Maker March 30 1974

Manfred Mann's back in the Workhouse again. Workhouse Studios that is, down the Old Kent Road. From behind the control room door, strange electronic twitterings rise and fall, then majestic sounds of a Mellotron. Manny's doing a final cosmetic job on passages of the Earthband's next album, "The Good Earth", putting the seal on his work, chasing the effects he wants with a meticulous ear. Make no mistake about it, he's re-emerging now as one of our most exciting keyboards artists. Then Manfred turns to you and says how much he loathes the recording process, it's so mechanical, so easy to get hung up. He's getting a bit hung up now, on a synthesizer part. He worries that as the band strives to improve with each new album they might lose essential energy. This has to be guarded against, also predictability and self indulgency.

Apparently Earthband have got enough edits out of this album to fill another track. Manfred likes his music to be grand, but not cold or too hard. Linking theme of the album is "the Earth," in the broadest sense. "Once we've tied the whole idea through," he says, "it'll connect with the kinda things everybody has been feeling the last few years about the earth." "It's not us in particular. Once you've seen a picture from space you begin to understand certain things." In writing, there's been greater contribution this time from guitarist Mick Roger's, not so much a joint effort between him and Manny but that Mick's spreading his wings more.

"Although I'm incredibly nervous of writers within a band," Manfred admits, "I've seen too many bands with lousy internal writers all wanting to do their own songs." "Mick's been in a band like that and there really are a lot of them. Well anybody can write a song man (or so they think), you just walk down the street and hum a tune and that's a song!" "So I'm absolutely neurotic about the material being good enough. But Mick is really beginning to write things which are that much better, and I wouldn't say so if I didn't really think so." It adds up to the reason why EarthBand openly uses material by other writers and will continue to do so. "But take Father of Day," Manfred suggests, their current single from "Solar Fire." By the time we finished with it, it was as much our song as Dylan's I think. "I really don't mean that to sound arrogant but there was so much concept put into the song, and yet we were basically using what I think is a lovely song."

Manfred applies the same rigorous critique that he has for others, to himself. "I certainly do because I play to the other guys, and I'm like a nervous compass! If ther's the slightest degree of doubt, I'm the first one to say it's not good enough. If I'm really certain about something I push it a little bit harder, but I try to sense the outside." Manfred sits at home and listens to album after album, not for pleasure any more, but almost as part of a profession. "I get an immense degree of boredom out of it – but by doing it I find tracks, and in doing it I found the title track of this next album."

The band were recently back from their third American tour where at last things started to buzz for them, in a way that's had a considerable impact on the presentation of their music. "America has made a difference in our playing, now our playing will slowly settle back a little because we're recording, we're only playing weekends, we're not consistently on the road. But one of te main things about America is the realisation of how important it is as a market. We feel there's a chance they'll really turn on to us there in a big way, whereas I don't get that feeling here. A lot of bands go to America and it destroys them. They find the pressures very difficult. In some ways, obviously the pressures are very high and things becomes more intense. But in our case, certainly over the last years, it's been a big factor in our survival, this absolute confidence that things were going to go right in the States."

Jeff Ward

[Top]