Down And Out In London And Paris, their latest of five studio releases to date, sees prog rock band The Tangent concentrate more than ever before on their artistic expressiveness. “Our new album is a 100 per cent musical project. Where the previous album, Not As Good As The Book, was this whole multimedia thing with illustrations and science fiction novel, this one is about five pieces of music on a single CD,” keyboardist/guitarist/vocalist Andy Tillison points out. “In terms of format, it’s more like our very first album, kicking off with a 19-minute piece which I am sure fans of the band’s prog stuff are going to like. Hopefully a lot!”

For keyboardist/vocalist Andy Tillison, it’s mainly the inconsistencies of an alleged zeitgeist that provoke him to realize his musical visions. Together with his band, The Tangent, Tillison has assigned himself the rather difficult task of creating with a successively changing line-up music which, despite all cross-references to the Seventies, still sounds topical and future-oriented. “The idea behind the first three albums was to rediscover the styles and sounds and ambition of the 1970s progressive music scene before it was artificially replaced by record companies and the media”, he says. “However, just because an idea is thirty years old does not mean that it is backward looking.” With their fourth offering, the double album Not As Good As The Book, The Tangent have even gone one step further. Tillison: “Our new album, while rooted in the same tradition, has a bigger palette of sounds and styles. This time we did not restrict ourselves to formulae at all, and the overall idea is having established the Tangent’s basic roots, we can now develop them and do something different. It’s a more live sounding record than its predecessors, and I think it rocks more than the other three.”

For keyboardist/vocalist Andy Tillison, it’s mainly the inconsistencies of an alleged zeitgeist that provoke him to realize his musical visions. Together with his band, The Tangent, Tillison has assigned himself the rather difficult task of creating with a successively changing line-up music which, despite all cross-references to the Seventies, still sounds topical and future-oriented. “The idea behind the first three albums was to rediscover the styles and sounds and ambition of the 1970s progressive music scene before it was artificially replaced by record companies and the media”, he says. “However, just because an idea is thirty years old does not mean that it is backward looking.” With their fourth offering, the double album Not As Good As The Book, The Tangent have even gone one step further. Tillison: “Our new album, while rooted in the same tradition, has a bigger palette of sounds and styles. This time we did not restrict ourselves to formulae at all, and the overall idea is having established the Tangent’s basic roots, we can now develop them and do something different. It’s a more live sounding record than its predecessors, and I think it rocks more than the other three.”

With the already existing three studio albums, The Tangent have proved that even today you can still pull a dedicated fanbase with classic progressive rock. The fact that The Tangent are also an excellent live band is demonstrated in a very special manner on their first DVD ‘Going Off On One’.