Why Should You Care About Ian Carr's Nucleus?

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Nucleus finally talk about it…

….later.

How does this all work? Annoying people is fun!

Sam Kriss noted that “something annoying is both fascinating and unbearable,” in I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves (Damage 2021). “But it’s interesting how it seems to be impossible to object to something annoying simply on the basis that it’s annoying. Annoyances are small, they’re not important; you can swat a fly if it buzzes too close, but it’s hardly worth getting out of your chair. At the same time, any annoyance left alone too long becomes maddening, and the more minor the annoyance, the crazier it makes you.”

In the Gas Giants episode Gong – The Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy, Gav set forth a theory of Prog: “The trap for Prog Rock that it must not fall into is that it end up being basically Chuck Berry carried out by grotesquely huge means. It has to have a certain amount of complexity otherwise it's just a lot of noodling and not actually very much content.”

He explained that Prog makes Chuck Berry go on forever. “Wheres a Chuck Berry guitar solo would maybe be 40 or 30 seconds long, be very simple and to the point and actually really good, in the world of prog, if everything's gone wrong, it will be 18 minutes long.”

An annoying song and dance

Recordings, etc…

A playlist of the main albums of the Ian Carr / Don Rendell Quintet that preceded Nucleus, with some additional material from other pre-Nucleus projects

Here’s one with most of the Nucleus studio albums, but sadly missing Out of The Long Dark and The Pretty Redhead.

So there’s Out of the Long Dark…

and here’s Awakening…

Don’t look at it too long, it’ll make you lose your mind! The famous Vertigo Swirl, very much the stuff of legends…

Interviews, Video, etc…

Chris Spedding gives valuable insight into the beginning of Nucleus and why he left. We’ve put the interview, which is a long one, to the exact spot where he discusses this, but he’s an interesting guy and it is well worth listening to the whole thing. For guitar heads, there is also a discussion of equipment.

In case you were curious after we’d spoken about both Pete Brown and Graham Bond, here they both are.

Here’s another one set up for the exact moment when Nucleus is discussed, but the entire show is worth a look…

Check out the Snakehips era band on German TV with a wildly enthusiastic Alexis Korner somehow in charge of the proceedings. Who knew he spoke German?

This is maybe around the time of Under the Sun, a really great show in Norway. There is an interview at about the 27 minute mark.

Do we recognise this?

Oh Yes!

Print, etc…

• "Out Of The Long Dark", Alan Shipton's dry but at least factual account of Ian's Life

• "Music Outside" Nobody wrote better about Ian Carr than Ian Carr, but this 1973 book, long out of print but now available in a 2nd edition, saves only the last chapter for an account of the founding of Nucleus and devotes the rest of the space to wonderful portraits of the British Musicians who were effectively trying to find a British identity in Jazz. Highly recommended

Nucleus & Next, A Personal Odyssey, etc…

The relaxed blues number, Easy Does It Now.

...and here's an early version of the Band, without Tom , playing a tune which was very much based on "Easy Does It Now". 1982, I Think…

Was this ,perhaps…

Visions Of Ra, the Next demo from December of 1983

The origin of this bass line? Clue: This is the Christmas of 1983.

Robert’s account of how Next happened

My memory insists that in 1982 Gavin came to our youth orchestra rehearsals wearing a corduroy suit and a Paisley bow tie. Now I’m sure he didn’t, and I’m also pretty sure that this impression settled in over the years thanks to 1) an anecdote of James’s in which a 13- or maybe 14-year-old Gavin did indeed turn up to Sunday afternoon Crusaders classes in a green velvet suit, and 2) his uncanny resemblance at the time to television’s Doctor Jonathan Miller.

At these rehearsals our Gav impressed me as being witty, self-confident and slightly eccentric, traits he displayed flamboyantly when he showed up at Glasgow Airport wearing a nipple-chafing gondolier’s t-shirt the day we jetted off on our life-changing world tour of Nuremberg. Needless to say, the rest of us were very Scottishly attired in v-necks and parkas, except for one poor guy, a low-ranking percussionist named Martin, who turned up in a cobalt blue three-piece suit bought by yokel parents expressly for his first time on a plane. Hilariously, a couple of years later this same percussionist quite unintentionally became the mainspring of no small amount of anguish for our Ken, because this chap Martin, you see, was at the time going steady with a hot-blooded young lass that Ken would subsequently and devotedly squire, and, from those very same times at the orchestra, you see, Ken just happened to be privy to the fact that Big Martin the drummer, his amatory predecessor, was appallingly well-endowed… well, it was never going to work.

Anyway, to Bavaria we flew, much fun was had, and I got to see Gavin perform free jazz in his mamilla-flaying Venetianesque t-shirt in the cellar of a Baader-Meinhof-backed community centre called The Komm. The following day, to the beat of Ian Carr’s In Flagrante Delicto, I collared him on the tour bus with the proposition that we form a band, which we most certainly did, a little over a year later…

To be Continued…

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