The Loose Ends
This is the opening scene of the suite and sees a old professor, finger poised over the ‘on’ button of a huge machine called The Big Red Spark, ready to switch it on. The rest of the album is seen as a flashback to events leading up to this moment.
It’s a bloody difficult thing to begin an album with a spoken word piece so in designing the theme behind the Big Red Spark concept, I started thinking about those classic 70’s rock operas like Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds and the Who’s Tommy. The spoken word intro was performed by my father who luckily enough spent most of his adult life as a radio broadcaster. Happily, he stuck to the script and didn’t ramble on about cricket and who’s still alive from the cast in Dad’s Army.
Simon
The idea was that building the Big Red Spark had been the Professor’s life work, so I was him at the beginning and Simon’s Dad was him at the end, when things were complete. The quote from Nietzsche was provided by the Library Angel.