The Loose Ends

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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.

Robert

Three wishes? I gave everyone a single wish. Nietzsche said: “What has become perfect, all that is ripe – wants to die.” The wish that feeds itself, the wish you cannot stop. I wish I had been spared this wish. But this is not my story. It is the story of the machine that Nietzsche had dreamed of. The story of the Big Red Spark.

And here I start my story
Right where I ended life
All imperfect, unevolving
Out of time, and out of fight
No family surrounding me
But my work, my love, my debt
The loose ends of my life

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