Allan Crockford of The Galileo 7 Talks New Album And More

Who is in The Galileo 7, what do they play and how did you meet?

Me – Allan Crockford on vocals and guitar

Viv Bonsels – organ and vocals

Paul Moss – bass and vocals

Mole – drums and vocals.

Viv and I are married. I met her in the kitchen and asked if she wanted to play in a new band I was putting together to play all those songs I’d been stockpiling for about five years. She been hearing them drifting up from the cellar for all that time and I thought she must like some of them, otherwise she’d have left me. She was a decent bass player in a former life but decided she wanted to play the organ in this band, despite having not touched a keyboard since she had one piano lesson when she was five.

I met Paul through a mutual friend. He was a professional bass player who played with about nine other bands and I thought he could do with being in another one to get into double figures. However, that meant he was also incredibly busy, and had to leave us temporarily so he could arrange to leave some of his other bands. He came back to us eventually, so I suppose we won.

Mole joined us to replace Paul. When we lost our original drummer he suddenly revealed that he was also a fantastic drummer and wanted to take the opportunity to sit down at gigs. Paul came back on bass, and The Galileo 7 (MKIII) was born.

The common thread between all of us, apart from ending up in a band together, is that they’d heard of, or been fans of, some of my former bands, particularly The Prisoners, The Solarflares and the James Taylor Quartet. I had a lot to live up to. Hopefully the fact that we are still together, or married in one case, means I didn’t disappoint too much!

Your new album ‘You, Me and Reality’ is out now. How did you want to approach the making of the album?

The intention was to do it the same way as the six albums that preceded it, initially. I would write a handful of new songs at home, make demos for the band to listen to and then we play them in rehearsal, rip them apart, put them back together and make them band performances. Then we record live backing tracks at Mole’s eight track analogue studio, then overdub and mix at our house. The pandemic scuppered that before we’d even started that process. Like everyone else, we couldn’t meet or play. We devised a method of remote recording that gave good results for songs that already existed, like cover versions or old songs of ours, but it wasn’t conducive to working up new material. You need to be all in the same room, and we weren’t allowed. It was OK for the government to have parties, but not for the little people. Anyway, I carried on writing new songs, but we put the recording of it on hold, apart from one song. In the meantime we remotely recorded a few cover versions for the hell of it, plus a mini-album of new versions of old songs of ours. It kept us ticking over. Me and Viv also recorded two albums of covers as a duo called Sounds Incarcerated. It kept us sane in that eighteen months that the band couldn’t get together.

Where did you record the album and who produced it?

We record the backing tracks at Mole’s North Down Sound studio. It’s essentially a rehearsal room with an analogue 8-track tape recorder. Drums, bass and a bit of guitar go down live, then it’s transferred to computer for overdubs and mixing. I do all the production and engineering of our stuff, apart from the initial live session. Mole engineers that, as well drumming. We’re all multi-taskers.

One of the tracks is called ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’. What was the story/inspiration behind the track?

The title comes from a book by GK Chesterton. I read it a couple of years ago and liked it a lot. A kind of surreal nightmare with gothic overtones and comic elements. The title stayed with me for some reason. The song itself is mostly about what goes through your head as you lose someone, in this case my Dad during Covid. Surreal nightmare is about right. It’s all there in the lyrics, just put to kick arse psych-rock backing to undercut the seriousness a little. He died on a Wednesday, but ‘The Man Who Was Wednesday’ didn’t sound as good.

Who created/designed the album cover?

The album artwork was done by a good friend of ours, Darryl Hartley. He’s a talented artist as well as musician, and the go-to man in Medway when it comes to album design. He’s done most of our stuff.

Who are some of your musical influences?

I think you can hear a lot of 60’s psychedelic pop in our sound, with the added energy and DIY roughness of our Medway background. We’ve got loads of layered harmonies and tricky arrangements played with the sometime slightly ramshackle and barely harnessed energy of garage-rock. Someone once said we sounded a bit like a heavier version of The Hollies with Keith Moon on drums. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but maybe it sums up where we’re at (man).

What two things do you hope to have achieved once you have left the stage?

Played to the best of our limited ability and driven a few people to the merch table to buy our records!

Do you have any favoured stage instruments, effects, pedals, microphones etc?

Mole always prefers to use his 1965 Premier drum kit. I’ve got a Lazy J20 custom built combo which cost me an arm and two legs. I usually play an 80’s Epiphone Sheraton that I had rebuilt with Gibson hardware and hand-wound PAF pickups (is this boring enough…?). Viv would like to use her ancient 1968 Teisco organ, but it’s permanently at the menders. Paul has various Fender basses to choose from and doesn’t seem to mind what he has to plug into. A sensible attitude when faced with some of the backline that venues provide. A good musician will get a decent sound out of anything (mostly).

Where is your hometown and could you please describe it in five words?

I’m from Rochester, part of the Medway Towns in Kent. Five words… Familiarity breeds contempt. It’s home.

Do you have any plans for live shows in Europe/UK in 2024?

Hastings – Fratcave at the Pig Palace, May 18th

Margate – 60’s Weekender at Olby’s, May 25th

In between the last two I’m also playing a few gigs with my old band, The Prisoners. One of them is at The Roundhouse on May 24th. That will be a busy and possibly brain-frying week.

Which of your new album tracks hear you at your a) happiest, b) angriest and c) most reflective?

I’m not really one for extremes of emotions. Writing a song is mostly a reflective act, unless you’re churning out songs to a template. However, this album does contain at least three songs that are very reflective (if you can apply adverbs to that word!) because they are directly or indirectly about personal loss. Musically they are still quite ‘up’ songs because I like the contradiction of form and content – if that doesn’t sound too pretentious. I’m sure it does! Those songs are ‘A Quiet Place’, The Man Who Was Thursday’ and ‘Something In Your Eyes’. The title track, ‘You, Me and Reality’ is quite positive (for me), but I’m not sure if it qualifies as ‘happy’! Uplifting music, ruminative lyrics.

Was it a difficult album to write?

There was a period when the songs dried up, probably because of the general circumstances of the period. But the well filled up again eventually, as it usually does. Song ideas are always around, floating in the ether. The difficult thing is grabbing them and forcing them into shape. Most songs don’t live up to what you envisage when the idea pops into existence. It’s like trying to make 3D models of those impossible shapes that can only exist on paper. But you can usually listen to the finished article a few months later and think it was a good try.

How do you look after your voice?

There’s not much to look after, to be brutally honest! I don’t have a regime. Maybe I should.

What makes Allan Crockford happy and what makes you unhappy?

Happy: Viv

Unhappy: idiots