Spiers & Boden kick off their winter tour on Wednesday, February 5 at the Pavilion Theatre, Worthing (tickets on 01903 206206).
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00:00Good afternoon, always lovely to speak to John Spiers. Now you are heading with John
00:06Bowden on the winter tour to Worthing before too long. It's the first day on the winter
00:11tour, plenty of dates stretching ahead. And we were just talking about this fabulous connection
00:15that you have with John that goes back for such a long time. And to an extent, it's because
00:20you are rather different, isn't it, in personality terms?
00:23Yeah, I think we're sort of chalk and cheese or whatever, two different things, you know,
00:30elbow and other part of the body. We're quite different. I think it's getting easier as
00:39the years go past to tell the difference between us. But it's, yeah, no, we work very differently
00:46musically and personality wise.
00:51Speaking of those personalities then, how would you categorise each of you?
00:57I'd say that John's an incredibly methodical musician, and he's often very good at kind
01:04of being ambitious in the right way, you know, thinking up new grand schemes and ideas, which
01:14is something that I tend to play music until I fall upon something, and then try and figure
01:20out how I can sell that to everyone else. And so a Spires and Bowden album is quite
01:25a nice medium between those two things, you know.
01:28It's a meeting in the middle, is it then?
01:31It's organic, but it's got a purpose.
01:36But it must be so fantastic to have that shared friendship, that working together that goes
01:42back 30 odd years, nearly, not far short of 30 years.
01:46Yeah, it's like a successful marriage, you know, we all have our own spaces. But when
01:53we come together, it's for a shared goal. And it's just as much fun doing it now, you
02:01know, playing on stage, as it was early on, we're playing to sort of much bigger audiences
02:07than we started off doing, obviously, as the years have gone by, we've picked people
02:13up along the way. But essentially, the show you're getting, albeit through microphones,
02:21is the same kind of show that I hope we'd have got better. But it's the same kind of
02:25show you'd have seen back in those early days, we play how we play together, and we put our
02:32arrangements together how we put them together. And the show is going to be a kind of mix
02:37of everything from all six albums we've done over our career as a duo. And if anything
02:44takes our fancy as well, we'll have that in. It doesn't take us very long to put a piece
02:50together. So there may be something new as well.
02:53And you said a really lovely thing just now when I was saying about another album at some
02:57point, and you said it'd be nice to go home. That's how you regard this partnership, going
03:01home?
03:02Absolutely. It's completely within my comfort zone, if you know what I mean.
03:11Even if it pushes you a bit?
03:12It does. Yeah. I mean, every time we get to a new song, you'd hope to find something new
03:18on your instrument that you hadn't done before. Otherwise, it'd be boring. But that's kind
03:24of what we do. We try and create an atmosphere around a song. Every song is different. And
03:29so we'll try and find new moods, new depths that we can add to the song with our instruments.
03:41And it's always a voyage of discovery. But the process is like being at home. It's like
03:47that's the job I first had. And with me and John, we know exactly sort of the direction
03:53the other one is going to go with it. So it's very comfortable, very nice to work that way.
03:59It's a perfect partnership. We're lovely to speak to you again. The tour starts in
04:03Worthing and goes pretty much everywhere. Thank you for your time.
04:07Brilliant. Thank you very much.