Brian Gulland (East 1969) began his musical career as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral where he took up the bassoon in 1959 at the age of eight. Sixty-one years later he is about to release his latest album and although he doesn’t like to ‘blow my own krumhorn’ he agreed to talk to us about some of his experiences.
“I started playing the Bassoon at choir school because we had to learn the piano and one other instrument. I’d already been learning the piano for about three years and tootling around on the recorder, the bassoon came up to just above my nose at the time!
It was a very magical time and the cathedral has been a fantastic influence. The music was quite wonderful and all those buildings at that time were built to the golden mean – the master masons knew exactly how to create a shape that would really hold the sound of voices. Almost all the choristers got music scholarships to go on to other schools – which happened with me.’
At the age of 13 Brian’s love of the Bassoon led him to believe his career lay with playing in an orchestra. However his love of pop music was also set at an early age. ‘I was never the same again when my older cousin bought Hound Dog and Blue Suede Shoes, I would have been seven years old. The late ‘60s was a very fertile time for music at Cranleigh. Hilary Davan Wetton was Director of Music during my Sixth Form years. Music teacher, Derek Bourgeois, was also a huge influence on me.
‘I was let out by Hilary to do various small orchestral gigs around Guildford. There were three of us, me, Robert Spearing (1&4 South 1968) and Colin Howard (2 North 1968). We’d get the bus into Guildford on a Thursday evening and go to something called The Proteus Choir, which was a very high standard Youth choir conducted by Vernon Handley who was in charge of the Guildford Philharmonic Orchestra. It was the only really good quality orchestra outside of the main cities. He was a very fine musician and conductor and we’d have a half pint of bitter afterwards. I was in the right place at the right time. It was very enriching.’
The Cranleighan from summer 1969 printed a review from The Surrey Advertiser: “An opportunity for several pupils at Cranleigh School to show their paces on a variety of musical instruments was given at the ‘Orchestra for Fun” concert at the School on Thursday last week …… The last soloist was Brian Gulland (bassoon), who played Senaille’s Introduction and Allegro Spiritoso with dash and humour. This truly was a “fun” piece and Brian Gulland received loud applause from an appreciative audience.”
In his two years in the Sixth Form Brian became more interested in rock and pop music and went to London with his great friend Jon Tysoe (1&4 South 1969) for their first live gig – Jefferson Airplane and The Doors at the Round House, Chalk Farm.
Brian knew exactly what he wanted from life and ‘had nailed my colours to the mast by the time it came to choosing A Levels. Being lazy I just wanted to do music A Level but I added RE and English when pushed. John Vallins was Housemaster of 2 North at the time and he was my tutor. I still see him. He understood that I was completely disinterested and only doing it under sufferance – I was aiming to just do enough to scrape the very lowest pass grade. My friend John Tysoe was much more academic and focussed than me, he produced five sides of foolscap with A Level English mapped out for me with bullet points for our set books and I studied that for a few days and sure enough I managed to get an E.
“I was let off cricket half way through Cranleigh because I became progressively better at golf and became captain of School golf in my last year which is largely why I have ended up where I have, because as captain of School golf I was invited to the Old Cranleighan’s Autumn meeting that year and it just happened to be at Littlehampton. It was such a seminal experience playing there with all these old Cranleighans. They really knobbled me on the Saturday at lunchtime because there was at least a pint of beer before lunch, then quite a lot of wine with lunch, and then this thing called Kimmel which they had with coffee – must be an OC tradition because I have never seen it anywhere else. I was complete rubbish in the afternoon.
Brian was in the National Youth Orchestra for a year whilst at School and then on leaving Cranleigh he and Martin Roke (1&4 South), who had also been a chorister, shared a flat while they attended the Royal College of Music. In his second year at the Royal College Brian had realised that actually it would be the wrong choice to join an orchestra. Whilst working out his notice in the Summer term he was approached by fellow student Richard Harvey who was studying clarinet. He insisted Brian should buy a krumhorn ‘so we jumped on my Honda 50 and went around the corner to the local krumhorn shop – as you do! That was the Friday afternoon and on Tuesday morning, having learned it over the weekend, I was in the studio with the only group of medieval players who were actually performing concerts proper in those days, called Musica Reservata. We were recording for Phillips Classical 16th Century Basque Dancers and that involved a concert of 4 krumhorns, like a choir – so this was a great moment for me, I felt a great familiarity and warmth toward this music.
‘Within a month of leaving the college we had done this recording, gone to Amsterdam and played in the Concertgebouw there. It was all train in those days, quite brilliant. There were about a dozen of us – they were all totally eccentric people. It was a great mix, there was a housewife from Bath who had been trained to sign in this completely non-vibrato voice, and all sorts of odd boddlikins. Then we went to Berlin. It was a night journey and we stopped at some fairly big station in East Germany for about two hours. A totally unofficial stop and Richard and I entertained the passengers by playing krumhorns out of the window at 2 o’clock in the morning. The group had dressed me up in my penguin suit as they thought they might lose me in Berlin in my hippie gear.”
Shortly after this, Brian and Richard Harvey were playing as part of a trio at a restaurant in the Fulham Road called Teddybear’s Picnic. But then the lute player left and they were joined by guitarist Graham Taylor who was a schoolfriend of Richard’s, he was only 17 at the time. The manager of the restaurant decided that he was going to manage them so they had to get a name. ‘He wanted to call us Codpiece – well we weren’t having any of that! We finally settled on Gryphon. We added a percussionist and It started out as a completely acoustic 4 piece.
‘Outside of this restaurant we started playing at a department store called Escalade in Knightsbridge 2 nights a week. It had an escalator and we used play sort of King Henry VIII stuff going up and down these escalators all dressed up. Completely stupid but quite well paid.
‘Richard is a real virtuoso on recorders and krumhorn, and we bought an electric harmonium, Graham played acoustic guitar, I played Bassoon and bass and tenor krumhorns and the lower recorders and Dave (Oberle) had this weird hybrid kit – he had been a rock drummer and he just kept the floor tom tom from that and added a pair of bongos, a Chinese gong symbol, an African talking drum, etc. The only place that would countenance having us really as we such an unusual combination of styles was the folk community, so we used to do lots of folk club gigs and initially we took folk song lyrics from books and completely rewrote them in an original style musically.
‘By 1973 we managed to get a record contract and attached to this record company there was another overgrown school boy (like us) called Martin Lewis who did PR for them. He was highly enthusiastic and completely took us to his heart, he got fantastic exposure for us. I am fairly sure that we are the only group ever to have appeared on Radio 1, 2, 3, and 4 and that was all in the same week.
‘Then we went off on tour with a really well known electric folk group of the time called Steeleye Span. We made our second record for which (unlike the first which had been lots of medieval influences), we started adding electric instruments and we had electric keyboards and a bass player. It was all self-written music and that’s really where things started to expand. By now I had made friends with a marvellous progressive rock band called Yes who came to be quite big. They took us under their wing and their manager was ostensibly managing us. It was a complete mutual admiration society between the two bands and by 1974 when we’d released our 3rd album we went off on tour with them to America which was highly exciting. It was only a winter tour, just over five weeks, so sadly I didn’t make it over to the west coast which I would have loved, but we did play Madison Square Garden which was completely full. We opened the show for them. Twenty-one and a half thousand people. I never got nervous because I would transfer any nerves into nervous excitement. We did 33 concerts in 38 days and a plane hop in between every one. We didn’t go anywhere by road. It is the nearest I have ever been to having a job routine!
“We also played the Houston Astrodome on that tour, (an enormous stadium designed for Baseball and American Football and dubbed the “Eight Wonder of the World”) which was great fun. Then we did our first proper UK Tour the next spring and we played at Queens Park Rangers football ground and Stoke City. We had already played at the Albert Hall by this time, supporting Steeleye Span.
Gryphone also wrote and played the music for Sir Peter Hall’s National Theatre production of The Tempest at the Old Vic and were the first and only band to ever play a live gig there.
http://wearecult.rocks/embracing-the-madness-of-gryphon
“We (Gryphon) produced five studio albums in five years. It was very intense, lots of touring lots of recording. Although we were quite a well-kept secret we did actually make the lower regions of the Album charts – for one week in August ’73. That was the very first album. The more prog rock we became the wider the audience became. Gryphon played at Cranleigh in 1973. It was our first album material so there wasn’t a lot of rock in it. It was beat-y, but it wasn’t at all loud or aggressive so I don’t think we offended the rather staid Common Room of the time. – I met quite a lot of the masters who I’d known while I was there and they seemed really chuffed with what we had come up with, which is very gratifying and humbling.. There certainly weren’t any of these kind of gigs in my time so I think it was a first and of course the boys gobbled it up!’
Gryphon appeared on quite a lot of BBC in the early 70s, but they had a policy of wiping the video tapes so only this one remains https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RYViWUyjmpg
‘By the late 70s we had done what we needed to do. Punk and New Wave came along and prog rock bands had really run their course. I was head hunted by the French equivalent of Gryphon, a French folk-rock band called Malicorne. I spent two very happy years over there making a new record and doing loads of gigs all over France.
‘I returned to the UK and got stuck into commercial composition, which inevitably involved lots of session playing for other people and arranging and producing music for television. I was used as a session player by Hans Zimmer who is very well known now. He had a studio in Fulham before Hollywood came calling. Then along came Harry Gregson Williams (composer, orchestrator, conductor and music producer) and we were like brothers in a way – he was another ex-chorister, from St Johns Cambridge, and before he started doing all the films I did lots of playing for him. I was house composer for a TV jingle company that George Martin the Beatles producer was involved with, we would see him occasionally and I got to pick his brains quite a few times about the Beatles. He was a lovely man. I have been lucky enough to work with some incredible people. I did lots of work with John Williams, the classical guitarist, and collaborated on a project with Virgina McKenna.’
Over the years Brian has taught himself to play an increasing variety of unusual instruments. ‘The instrument I played at the test match in India (https://www.bcci.tv/videos/20373/brian-gulland-adding-colour-to-test-matches-with-a-dash-of-music-) was a Trumbonian – an American marching band instrument, it was only made in the 50s and 60s, so it is standard tenor trombone but instead of having the slide it is all wound up. It is more like a euphonium or a small tuba and it has valves – it is far from being a major instrument for me, but it is good fun!
Gryphon got together for a one-off reunion in 2009. “The drummer had been at us ever since the millennium and we finally gave in. We rehearsed for a whole month then rented the Queen Elizabeth Hall. We nearly filled it which was about 900 people and people came from all over – Canada, Louisiana. There was a little girl of 12 who had discovered our records in her parents’ vinyl collection and persuaded her parents to bring her over from Athens. Quite a lot of Scandinavian people, Spain, Italy. Our second largest demographic outside of people our own age is 18-25-year-old males. Again many of them have discovered our music through their parents’ vinyl collection.
Subsequently, Gryphon played some gigs in 2015, including The Union Chapel, featured at the Cropredy Festival in 2016, and in 2017, an invitation to a ProgRock festival in Portugal, and in the UK, the NewDay Festival near Canterbury. The first new Gryphon record for 41 years ‘ReInvention’ was released in 2018 and the next one Get out of my father’s car is due out by Christmas 2020.
Covid permitting Gryphon will be playing to the Brinkely Theatre, Runcorn on 22 April 2021. Book your tickets here.