James Hodkinson grew up on Merseyside from the late 1970s through to the early 90s. The sound track of his early life was the music of the heavy, progressive and so-called space rock genres, which drifted in through his bedroom window from older kids’ houses and mingled with the more indigenous sounds of his family home. This collision saw King Crimson, Hawkwind, Caravan, Pink Floyd and Marillion blend with Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, Elton John and the Carpenters and Crosby, Stills and Nash, as well as the classical symphonies played on old vinyl records by his grandfather.
Largely self taught on guitar and keyboards, though with some classical training and theory from school, he began playing in bands around the age of fifteen. Around this time James connected with more contemporary music in the form of American guitar-based indie and grunge, as a wave of US bands such as Hüsker Dü, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, the Pixies, Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction broke on British shores. This led him to look back to older U.S. music, where he found and embraced the likes of MC5, The Stooges and Blue Cheer. His early bands 1988-92, were largely guitar driven, with a garage, psychedelic feel, marked an attempt to fuse heavy guitar rock with ambient, space music, but also melodic song writing traditions.
Picking up other influences as he went, including Radiohead and the Verve, the electronic tradition from Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk through to Aphex Twin and Air, as well as the melodic Doom Metal of Paradise Lost and Anathema, James returned to making live music after 2000, initially joining the Oxford-based ‘Assassins of Silence,’ a tribute band specialising in recreating the sound and visual experience of a Hawkwind gig. Working, too, with Kevin Perry from the Assassins, he re-formed a spin-off composing project that later became a live act, known as Xoo, in which James played bass and synths. Around 2006 his career moved up a gear, as he was asked to play keyboards for former Hawkwind bassist Alan Davey (Earthquake Records) and joined Danny Faulkner’s progressive metal act Pre-Med (Voiceprint) on keyboards and later bass guitar and vocals. James has played on a range of recordings with all of these artists.
Leaving many of these projects behind, James consolidated his commitments in 2010, joining heavy stoner space rock outfit Litmus (Rise Above Records), playing mellotron, organ and analogue synths. He also formed what was to be his most pivotal project, Shadowlight, after reconnecting with Mark Wilson in Hertfordshire late in 2009: the two had originally met at university in 1992, forming a rock covers band called Black Rain, and had remained in touch ever since. Encouraged by the success of bands like Porcupine Tree who have managed to combine ambient space music with metal, song-writing in a fresh and idiomatically British context, the duo set about building their new band.
Sharing both a love of the Progressive genre and having both spent time living in Oxfordshire and Merseyside the chance to talk to James was one eagerly taken. The Shadowlight album, Twilight Canvas, is progressive within a timeless effortless grace and a must hear for fans of the genre.
How has the reception to the new album been?
“Very positive from the fans we’re attracting so far, we’ve sold something approaching a thousand units, it’s self-produced, written and marketed by us so it’s been quite impressive. It’s what labels like to see so it will stand us in good stead. In terms of the critical response, I think we’ve had pretty overwhelmingly positive reviews. It seems to have made more of an impact in Europe more than anywhere. In Germany, Holland and Poland in particular, it seems very popular and Greece for some reason, we seem to be going well in places that aren’t doing well economically, we’re getting really positive reviews.”
It’s an exceptionally good album, it’s very cool. One of the things I did pick up on though, there seems to be a slight Genesis framework with Steve Hackett’s music running through it?
“The interesting thing is, I listen on occasion to the Peter Gabriel era, the first five Genesis albums, Mark who’s the other writer would listen to later Genesis but I don’t think either of us consciously referenced that, it’s not been a major influence, its more co-incidental if anything. I would say also that the one thing that’s been quite noticeable; is that people have all different ideas about the influences they’ve detected.
Everyone seems to think that there’s a very kind of contemporary, very hard guitar chassis that the whole thing sits on that seems to sound like Tool or Porcupine Tree or Anathema, these sort of powerful heavy guitars but on the other side of things, as well, organ sounds, Mellotron textures and harmony vocals, the melodies – owing something maybe to English choral music, folk music and the way it’s filtered down to levels of classic progressive rock like Genesis, King Crimson, Camel and other stuff. People say it’s bits and pieces of bands that they hear in Shadowlight and they all compare it to that but the overriding theme seems to be we sound like a marriage of contemporary, guitar-driven, noise rock or whatever and this very classical, more melodic side too!”
I should have thought of the Camel one myself, to be honest with you.
“It’s obviously on a sub-conscious level, our musical D.N.A. I mean, Andy Latimer, Steve Rothery and Dave Gilmour were the three main influences on my lead guitar playing. I never really sat down and wrote anything that was consciously like or was meant to sound like Camel. It was just something to do with the mix of instruments and the way like melodies slip in.”
It’s interesting that you should say that about like Marillion’s Steve Rothery for example, who is a wonderful musician, citing him as you do coming from Merseyside, which is not known for its love of progressive music.
“It’s much more a southern English middle class, public schoolboy sort of thing. I was never part of a Merseybeat tradition when I was growing up. It was the Liverpool indie-guitar music of the 80s and 90s I think – the John Power, Cast, The La’s, that kind of tradition. The way that the Merseyside sound resonates out across subsequent generations of Liverpool musicians, it’s again something that I grew up with, it’s very much part of that. All the kids in my school formed bands that were some sort or take on that tradition, which I never really was. I grew up listening to quite different things really – Hawkwind, very hypnotic kind of music and on the other side, the more intricate progressive rock of King Crimson and that sort of thing and it was at university that I connected with that as well.
When I moved down to Oxfordshire and eventually to Hertfordshire, I found that that were sort of bands that I liked, there were tribute bands, original bands. I would compare myself to Radiohead if you like a decade or so ago, they were sort of indie kids from an art school tradition but they were listening to their older brother’s progressive rock records, you can hear it on an album like O.K. Computer. I would put myself in that kind of bracket. I don’t ignore my Merseyside roots, they pervade what I do but it’s something more eclectic than that.”
Does your music interfere with your day job? You are obviously quite important within the realms of university life?
“I think it’s something to do with being an academic. Of course everyone in the band, I mean I do have a 9-5 job and I have plenty of work to do but I can be more flexible, I can give up a day or half a day during the week to do something like this or when we have studio time booked because I can work around the day job but I have a young family. I think we’ve all realised that we’ve come to a point where this band has gone as far as it can go really without us taking another step and I’m not saying that we’re about to call it quits on our careers. A lot of bands who are quite big have day jobs and work part-time or have other income streams to get them through because music generates very little money. I couldn’t certainly afford to quit my career. I don’t necessarily want to, I might look at phasing it, going part time, I feel that we’ve reached a critical mass, where the time we need to write and all the complexities of the music we make, the quality of it is outstripping what we can give to it, I think we need to do more than the cameo gigs and be able to tour.
We’re going to have to go up a gear in some way to take this band to the next level, which effectively means doing gigs in the second half of this year and we now have a new live line-up, which has changed slightly since we did the album. We have a new drummer called Carl Cole and we also have a second guitarist, Tony Wright, who is doing quite a lot of the lead guitar work, I’m doing more acoustic work, I’m not a lead vocalist but I have a more frontman kind of role in the band now so to get the many layers and textures of sounds, we found that we needed that line up. Paul who’s the original drummer wasn’t really able to move with us, given what his life’s like at the moment, so we found someone more local and we are working up a live set based on the album and we’ll be touring later this year. When I say touring, that’s a grandiose term! That’s really where I see us, starting to appear on the radar, we’ve got a lot of underground magazines, lots of small radio stations giving us good reviews and offers of gigs have started coming in to make the next jump up I guess.”
Shadowlight are currently working on a second album for 2014 and will be gigging the Twilight Canvas material this autumn.
Ian D. Hall