Tuesday 13 October 2009

Isle of Lismore,on holiday
I can just about get online here via the mobile phone GPRS signal, and today I read in Robert Fripp’s diary for 6 October (when he was in Air Studio 1 a few days after I was)

Bill [Bruford] has referred on several occasions … to the guitarist’s strategy during the recording of Red, of withholding his opinion. That is, neither for nor against. A better name for this strategy is radical neutrality.

I’ve found myself using this particular rehearsal strategy more often recently: asking everyone else for their opinions, but not proffering my own. Perhaps it’s a useful conflict avoidance strategy in the short-term, but I don’t think I can dress it up as ‘radical neutrality’. In my case it’s usually a more passive-aggressive way of expressing this: ‘I think that was crap, but I’ll try and get someone else to say it rather than cause an argument by saying it myself. If everyone else actually liked it, then I’ll give in temporarily to the democratic mandate, and try a different tack a bit later.’  That’s not neutrality, is it?

I’ve started listening to the tapes of the Edinburgh shows from August, which reveal many things: some very cheering, some less so.