Pointer, Mick (Arena) (August 2005)

An Interview With Mick Pointer

It's been 10 years since the release of the very first Arena album, Songs From The Lion's Cage... and that 10th year was marked by the release of their sixth full-length album, Pepper's Ghost. As if you need an introduction, Arena is the project begun by drummer Mick Pointer, who has been so far gone from his previous band that it seems silly now to say ex-Marillion (and yet folks do) and Pendragon keyboardist (and Kevin Bacon of the prog world) Clive Nolan. The rest of the line up has been evolving, but currently includes (and has for some time): Rob Sowden on vocals, Ian Salmon on bass, and John Mitchell on guitars. Joshua Turner spoke with Pointer a few months before their fantastic ROSfest pre-show performance. Josh notes, "When talking to Mick, I cannot help but think that he sounds a lot like that guy from Monty Python, John Cleese; you know, the famous one in all the commercials and movies these days."

Joshua Turner: First off, are you planning any upcoming tour, concerts, or festivals at this time?

Mick Pointer: Yeah, sure, we are, We've got a few festivals organized for the early summer and we'll be going on possibly a six week tour in September, October of Europe. On your side of the Atlantic, we?re playing ROSFest on the 29th of April.

JT: Great. I was just kind of curious, how did you come up with the name Arena for your band and what does that actually mean?

MP: Very good question. We actually didn't... we actually toured with a lot of names for the band when we first started. We actually had quite a lot of music already written before we had even decided on a name for the band and... there is a line, I think it is in the track "Solomon"... it goes, um, in your personal arena and we thought this sounded good. It was our own personal arena. So yeah, it doesn?t actually mean anything. It just sounded good at the time.

JT: I was recently listening to the new album that you just put out and it's a fantastic album. You guys did a great job.

MP: Thank you very much.

JT: What I'm curious about is, it's called Pepper's Ghost and it says on the cover it's seven stories of mystery and imagination.

MP:Yeah.

JT: Is this a concept album?

MP: It's not.

JT: Oh, it's not?

MP: No. Pepper?s Ghost actually is based around... a guy that was around in Victorian times in London. He went under the name of Professor Pepper and what he used to do, he used to create this illusion on stage of a ghost and make a ghost appear and... You know, the saying goes, it's all smoke and mirrors and we used that title for our second track on the album, and effectively what he used to do is, um, using smoke and mirrors, the illusion was to make a ghost appear on the stage. Exactly how he did it, I'm not sure, but it was quite a well known act during Victorian times in London. I'm not sure he actually took it anywhere else outside England, but... But, yeah, Professor Pepper was the guy's name and so the act became known as Pepper's Ghost. So really it was based around that scene, but, you know, illusions and... and hence that's where you see the cartoon characters that we've got. I don't know if you?ve seen the whole booklet of the album at all.

JT: Oh yeah. Actually, I was going to ask you about that, because I see you've got a comic book in place of the typical liner notes. It's both interesting and impressive. It's a very creative way of putting together liner notes.

MP: Yeah, it is, because what we actually... [what we] didn?t want to do this time was to have a picture of ourselves actually. Initially it came around with us not having a picture of ourselves standing up against a brick wall or standing beside a tree or by a light like a lot of bands do. We're pretty sick and tired of having publicity photographs done like that, so what we decided to do was have no publicity photographs done this time and... and as it creates just little stories for ourselves and [we] have our own characters, as you can see from the pictures. They're not exactly us, but they're remotely close to us. There are certain parts of our anatomy that got used, our eyes, and in a few places and... Uh, yeah, it looks just like the artist was given carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to do to make it look similar to us, but not us, And after that, then there you go. There's our characters and then there's our publicity photographs.

JT: You actually got a very talented artist to put this together. How did you find this person?

MP: He's the guy that did the Contagion album [cover] almost two years ago and he's actually a longstanding personal friend of our guitarist John Mitchell. They've known each other for years and years and... David Wyatt is the guy's name and we got know him about four or five years ago when we started talking to him about doing the Contagion album. But he'd never done any artwork for a band before. Most his artwork is done for books and illustrations, that sort of thing. He really came to do something for us and out of... along the conversations and ideas that we had together, we discovered that he actually works on a comic book magazine here in the UK similar to your Marvel Comics that you have in the US. It was an English version of that type of magazine and we discovered he's very talented at doing that type of cartoon work and so it wasn't Contagion, but we did say at another time, hey, that could be a good idea. There was a good possibility we could go with that at a later date and the later date was Pepper's Ghost. Through various connections is why it, why the album turned out the way it did.

JT: Do you have plans for another album at this time?

MP: Oh no. [we laugh] It's our tenth anniversary this year. We've all been together ten years. Um, we've been around for ten years and so we actually intend to tour as much as we can, as I said earlier. By the time spring is finished, we should have quite a few festivals in place and on this tour, hopefully early September, we will be invited to go to South America and six weeks in Europe and then... hopefully finishing the tour in Canada at the beginning of November. Our plan didn't really work out, but we'd like it to and that's what we're working on.

And you're also going to be involved in ROSfest, right?

MP: With ROSfest, yeah. We are the headlining band on the Friday night, the 29th of April.

JT: How did you actually get involved in ROSfest?

MP: Uh, we were invited. [we laugh]

JT: That's pretty simple.

MP: Well, we were purely invited.

JT: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your songwriting process. If you could kind of tell me how you conjure up these ideas and how you actually formulate your music? Like what's your process? Just how do you compose your music and put it together?

MP: Well, it's pretty much exactly the same as it has been since Clive and I met over ten years ago. I go to the studio and I have a bag of ideas, mainly these ideas that I've got on a Dictaphone or tapes or something like that. Um... just small snippets of music maybe. It might last only ten seconds long or it might be thirty seconds long, but just a gem of ideas is what we want to do. We just then sit together and we put all this music down in the studio, It's not done on a... it's just on a computer basically. He's got a big, huge keyboard setup and we just generally, slowly keep putting music to that. We don't try to form any tracks or we don't try to form songs or anything like that, no lyrics. And then what we try to do is get about an hour or two hours worth of music. We then start sifting through that music and start piecing bits together. Out of that we then think maybe a song might arrive out of that. It might be four minutes long. It could be ten minutes long. It depends on how long we feel, um, it feels good.

If it feels good, once we get through that process, Clive starts to put lyrics to the music and then of course, we also start opening up the music a little bit more to put lyrics in. We always want to make the music strong first before we write the lyrics. We want for me and Clive to actually get to the point where we enjoy listening to it without any lyrics and that's why our emphasis is on having very strong melodies all the time. During that process, someone, mainly John Mitchell, will also join us and add parts that he wants to add or, or put up some suggestions, but use it with music Clive and I have already written and just move it around a little bit. All that process could possibly take about six months for us doing that and, uh, hopefully it's... we've got an album pretty much ready and ready for recording. So it takes quite some time for us to put an album together. We don't normally rush it. We've never had to rush it, because we've never been under any particular deadlines to make things happen, but we tend to like to bring an album out once every two or three years.

JT: The technique that you have seems to be really paying off for you guys. Can you also tell me a little bit about your musical influences?

MP: Yeah, sure. Well, I like going way back, stuff like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull. I'm a big fan of Rush and... that's the sort of stuff that you see influencing me when I was... uh, younger than I am now [we laugh]. Yeah, I remember, I still like listening to music like that and, as time's gone on, I've got into Genesis and Pink Floyd. I suppose, as you get exposed to that style of music, you know, you tend to get into that. During the nineties, I'm particularly a big fan of Tool, which I love a lot and... I've got into... I like Jeff Buckley, I like Van Morrison a lot... Tea Party, [a] Canadian band; Tea Party are a really great band. Generally bands that rock I prefer.

JT: Can you tell me when your involvement in music actually began and when you decided to become a drummer?

MP: Oh my god. [I laugh] Well what happened [was], I used to live in a very small village in Buckinghamshire, which about 50 miles north of London and a couple very close friends of mine that used to live basically in the same street as me started playing guitar and I... I'm surely influenced, I used to love listening to The Beatles. I had a quite a lot older brother and sister, so they were always playing music, but not The Beatles; stuff I used to really liked listening to and my two friends started playing guitar and [at] one point, when they realized they were starting to get better at playing, they were looking for a drummer and they just found a guy locally that had a drum kit. I went along, watched them do it and I thought, I want to do that. So, the next day I bought a drum kit and... my drum kit was better than the other guy's and... so, all of a sudden, I'm in the band. And from then on things just took off. I mean, obviously many years later, but that was really why. I used to love listening to music. I mean, I never actually thought to myself that I could actually do it myself and I was just a great consumer of listening to music and reading about bands and what people were doing in bands and I'd go watch bands play and... uh, just out of the love of that came playing.

JT: How did you actually meet your bandmates in Arena?

MP: Okay, well... a bit of a long story, but... I was in a McDonald's many years ago and a couple of guys... we happened to be in this McDonald's, but... um, [these guys] had some Marillion t-shirts on. They started talking to me and they happened to be a couple of guys that ran a fanzine about progressive music and bands of that type. Just purely out of the blue, one of them phoned me up one day and said, hey, there's a guy called Clive Nolan that would really like to meet you. So I said, okay, I can't see no harm in it. So I went to a pub, met the guy Clive Nolan. We talked about things and then slowly things took... several months before we met up again and we started talking about, hey, maybe we should write music together. And that's exactly what we did. As for the other guys in the band... there's a guy there in the band at the moment... John Mitchell [who] happened to be a friend of a friend of John Jowitt's who used to be in Arena. The vocalist, Rob Sowden was a friend of John Mitchell's and Ian Salmon, he has known Clive for many, many years. He actually used to be in a band with him called Shadowland. I don't know if you know that band, but, he was in a band with him and he's been a musician for many, many, many years. And so it's really... friends of friends. There wasn't really any auditioning done as... as the sense of us putting an advert in the paper and trying to find, track people down. They're either people that either we have known about or several members of the band have known about for years and, and basically aware of their qualities as players and vocalists.

JT: I have a question that I'm always interested in asking and I usually find that it is hard for musicians either to come up with one example or to narrow it down to one, but can you think of any Spinal Tap moments that have occurred with this band?

MP: Gosh, quite a few actually. Um, yeah, arriving at venues when... when you actually think you're going to be... that it's actually going to be a really decent venue and... and you actually discover that, uh, you're actually on with... are appearing on stage with a guy who used to hammer nine inch nails up his nose, so if that helps you. [I laugh] And, uh, also getting to a hotel as well and getting the rooms completely wrong. That's, that's always been a complete bollocks that happens with any band. [I laugh]. Yeah, whoever wrote that Spinal Tap stuff, they certainly... spent some time with... it happens with any rock band at all times. It's part of a joke really, but, uh, hey, there you go.

JT: I'd like to find out a little bit about your current musical tastes. I'd like to start by asking you, what's the last CD that you purchased?

MP: The last CD that I purchased [was] only a matter of a couple days ago, that was AC/DC. Uh, that was their special edition live, so it's a double CD... Uh, for the life of me I can't recall what it's called. Well, it's the one that was released in '92, and it's a special edition with two CDs in it. [he's probably talking about AC/DC Live: Collector's Edition -JT] but yeah, that was my, that was my last purchase.

JT: Also along the same lines, what's the last concert that you've attended as a fan?

MP: That was about four months ago and that was seeing Rush at Wembley Arena in London, on their thirtieth anniversary tour.

JT: I'd also like to ask you some of your favorites and we can treat this as kind of short answer questions just to run through them, but what would you say is your favorite album?

MP: I couldn't possibly just pick out one, [I laugh]. In fact that would be impossible. Yeah, albums, you know, particularly that John Patton made I really love. Um, wow, the first one would have to be Deep Purple - Machine Head, because it was when I first heard that album that actually got me into... really got me into music. I couldn't believe it when I first heard it. I didn't even realize such stuff existed and that, that was a good moment in my life when I first heard that. Close To The Edge - Yes. When I first heard that... I mean that has a similar sort of influence on me. I thought that was absolutely stunning and still love it to this day. I must say I'm a great Led Zeppelin fan, pick any one. I particularly like the live album Song Remains The Same. That's pretty much... I couldn't really pick out something and just say yes, that's the one. But those ones, in particular various points... Actually, 2112 of Rush, when I heard that, that had a great affect on me. too. I thought that was fantastic.

JT: Yeah, those are all great choices. Also, who would you say is your favorite band?

MP: Yeah, that's going to be another difficult one. Well, I've always been a great fan of Rush and I saw them only a few months ago and that was a great thing to see. I saw Tool in London about three years ago and their performance on stage was fantastic. I mean, it's amazing, frankly. I... they were changing the way to go and watch a band play. I thought it was brilliant. But again, though there's still some stuff... I saw Pink Floyd do The Wall many years ago and that was pretty impressive. Uh...yeah, that's pretty much it. I've seen Jethro Tull several times. They're always great, great to watch live and... in fact four years ago I saw King's X also playing London and I thought those guys were brilliant. They really surprised me and they're excellent.

JT: We're actually nearing the end, but I just have few more questions here and just to mix things up, I'd like to ask you some favorites that aren't specifically related to music.

MP: Okay.

JT: What would you say is your favorite movie?

MP: My favorite movie... um, Zulu. The first, not Zulu Dawn, but Zulu with Michael Caine in 1964. Great, great movie; I still love it even to this day.

JT: And do you have a favorite TV show?

MP: Yeah, I do. Probably what I love... I'd probably take two actually. Two that I like and I watch all the time and love and that's Frasier and Seinfeld.

JT: Yeah, those are great. Also, do you have a favorite book?

MP: Um, none... not particularly, no. It's not something that I spend a lot of time doing. I probably read magazines and newspapers a little more. I'm a great, great consumer of taking the news in actually, so yeah, I've actually probably spent more time... if I ever get a chance to do any reading, I'll read a magazine or a newspaper.

JT: Okay. I also have a quirky question that I like to ask partly because it helps me identify with the artist and I know nobody else will ask it, but do you have any pets?

MP: Do I have any pets? Yeah, I do. I have a dog actually and... I've always had a dog for, uh, probably the last 15 years or so. I tend to like mongrels mostly, but out of everything, they have a much nicer attitude about themselves. They're always pretty happy to... as long you're kind to them, they're always kind back. I always found pedigree dogs sometimes they come with problems and, uh, so yeah, a mongrel dog.

JT: Before we wrap up is there anything you'd like to say to your fans at this time?

MP: Well, I would... I'd really like to say, hopefully to our fans in the US is that they can possibly get themselves over to Philadelphia on the 29th of April and come and support us at ROSFest. If they can't do it, try making it to Europe. [he laughs].

JT: I'll be seeing you at ROSfest, because that's a little closer.

MP: I think so, or even Canada. It's on our web site. If you could possibly put the information on your site about our site. It's www.verglas.com if you can do that.

JT: Yeah, we can certainly do that. Well, I wanted to thank you for taking time to perform this interview. You've put out a fabulous album. This new album is great. I really enjoyed it and I just wish you a lot of success on it.

MP: Alright. Well, that's very kind of you and, uh, hopefully maybe you might be able to make it to ROSFest and we might catch up and we can have a beer.

Arena's tour begins September 1, 2005 in Mexico, where they play four dates before the start of the European tour on September 16 in The Netherlands.

Discography:
Songs From The Lion's Cage (1995)
Pride (1996)
Welcome To The Stage (1997)
The Cry (ep) (1997)
The Visitor (1998)
The Visitor - Revisited (1999) (Dutch fan club only release)
Immortal? (2000)
Unlocking The Cage - 1995-2000 (2001) (Dutch fan club only release)
Breakfast In Biarritz (2001)
Contagion (2003)
Radiance (2003) (fan club only release)
Pepper's Ghost (2005)
Ten Years On (2006)
The Seventh Degree Of Separation (2011)
Live 2011/12 Tour (2012)
Unquiet Sky (2014)
Contagion Max (incl. Contagious & Contagium EPs) (2014)

Caught In The Act (DVD) (2003)
Smoke And Mirrors (DVD) (2006)
Rapture (DVD) (2013)