THE PHENOMENON OF PHENOMENA!

THE PHENOMENON OF PHENOMENA!

FEATURES

Sylvie Simmons

Professor Limit is dead. Hoist by his own petard, mashed in his own microwave, sucked up the cosmic drinking straw into his own little can of worms. Done to death by his life’s work: building a computer capable of absorbing brarnpower and reading minds, fueled by telepathic energy. Notably the energy of the Prof’s own nine-year-old telepath, Lucy.

It all started with humanitarian aims and government grants—until the military stepped in, and Limit turned to a pal with friends in high places to help him out of the mess. He showed him what the machine could do; but the demonstration went wrong, the Prof hit terminal wipeout and Lucy got chained inseparably to the hardware like a coma patient on a lifesupport system—and the one man who can save her is her father. Her real father. The Professor’s wife was doing some experiments of her own with Limit’s former lab assistant, Chasen, a man with mighty telepathic powers, too. And it’s up to him to join Lucy in the strange dreamworld she’s been zapped into, where the bones of the tormented lie deeper than a concept album, where bodies blow up and people disappear and demons dance and where when you look in the mirror you gaze at the face of fear...

Alongside the guitar-as-cock and the guitar-as-gun in heavy rock there stands the idea of the guitar as magic wand, musically abracadabraing ghosts and devils and vampires and spirits from heaven or hell or from just too many drugs. Could have something to do with volume equalling power equalling majesty equalling masculinity, teleporting long hair from femininity to ultra-barbarianism (I’m not a poof, I’m a Visigoth!). Or could just be it looks good on album sleeves. Whatever—unlike many purveyors of musical sci-fi and fantasy who use it as so much decorative flimflam, Tom Galley knows how to spin a yarn. That’s his yarn up there—sure, it sounds a lot like yarns that have gone before (Firestarter, plus bits of Carrie, The Legacy, The Exorcist and Alice Through The Looking Glass), Galley would be the first to admit it. He spent his formative years in a little English village cinema where his mom was usherette, watching late-’50s, early-’60s sci-fi. “I didn’t want to know about real life—it’s totally boring, and I still find it is now.”

But what Galley’s done that is original is transform the yarn into a comprehensive audio-visual package: Phenomena.

Phenomena's an album, a soundtrack to an as-yet-unnamed film, a video, an art exhibition and a group: Tom’s brother Mel Galley, Glenn Hughes, Cozy Powell, Neil Murray, Don Airey, Ted McKenna, Richard Bailey and John Thomas (and a handful of unknowns including a boy’s choir) the men behind Deep Purple, Rainbow, Gary Moore, Trapeze, Michael Schenker, Hughes-Thrall, Nazareth, Ozzy Osbourne, Rory Gallagher and Whitesnake (especially Whitesnake: ‘‘It’s basically a Whitesnake sort-of offshoot,” as Glenn Hughes puts it), some of the monuments of British heavy rock. It’s taken over two years for the thing to come together, and even now it’s not completely whole. The video they’re making at the moment (which conveniently serves to illustrate their British single, ‘‘Dance With The Devil,” as well as their American one, which looks like being ‘‘Still The Night”) will act as a trailer for an upcoming 70-minute fantasy adventure video—not to mention the TV series Tom had in mind when he gave the story a cliff-hanger ending. And they’re lining up some gigs which are meant to rival Pink Floyd’s The Wall in extravagance, ‘‘A lot of strange people onstage, all kinds of things going on,” says Glenn Hughes.

First came the songs—each of them a mini-adventure story dealing with a different aspect of the supernatural: ‘‘Twilight Zone,” about inexplicable disappearances, ‘‘Phoenix Rising,” about spontaneous combustion, ‘‘Kiss Of Fire,” vampires and hypnotism, ‘‘Dance With The Devil,” St. Vitus’s dance, “Believe,” exorcism, “Who’s Watching You,” ghost stories, ‘‘Hell On Wings,” the Battle of the Somme and ‘‘Phenomena,” the grand triumphant chorus of Good conquering Evil.

Then came the story line to link them together, and Tom’s concept of ‘‘a total audio-visual project; I wanted it to work on many different levels at the same time.” As this included a film which needed a small fortune to make, he had artist Ian Lowe paint pictures of each song to help sell the concept. The pictures appear, along with the plot, in a booklet that comes with the album.

Brother Mel was first to join in, even though he’d just joined Whitesnake at the time, then Richard Bailey, who played the demo tapes to Cozy Powell, who liked it enough to take a hell of a long time off of ELP to join in, and so on and so on, with Glenn Hughes coming in last to do the vocals and contribute a song of his own, ‘‘Still The Night.”

‘‘Tom’s an old friend of mine and basically he wrote the songs around my voice,” says Glenn. ‘‘He gave me the tape and I could hear myself singing them. Originally I was only going to sing on three tracks, but it was working so well I did them all—in three days. It was great; nobody was pressuring me.” Probably because there was nobody in the studio, except him and Tom. What with everybody having his own band to go back to, each musician popped in, did his bit and popped off again. Which put paid to any ego problems.

Like a movie, it may have been put together piecemeal, but it’s come out at the end as a dramatic whole. Especially dramatic—far more so musically than you might expect, considering the musicians involved. Not all Tom’s doing, according to Glenn. It might have been his idea, but everybody got a chance to put his two cents in. ‘‘It wasn’t like, ‘It’s my project, I’m going home!”’ says Glenn. ‘‘It’s very much a group project.” Even if the group is just part-time and the players only talked to each other over the phone.

In Glenn’s case, the moonlighting didn’t go down at all well with his full-time employer, Gary Moore. Two days before talking to CREEM, they parted company. Apparently, when Moore saw Glenn’s face promoting Phenomena on the cover of a British rock magazine, he went nuts. “That really pissed Gary off! With him it was, ‘You’re in my band’—and they didn’t say on the contract that I couldn't promote Phenomena, but the vibe was definitely against it,” even though Moore was off doing his sideline thing with Phil Lynott. “Tell me about it! Still, I’m as relieved as hell. Now I can do exactly what I want.” Which in his case means a solo career, a Hughes-Thrall reunion, a Trapeze reformation, possibly, with his old cohort Mel Galley, those bigproduction Phenomena shows being set up in Europe, Japan and the States, and a second Phenomena album, due to start recording around Christmas. “I’ll be in there,” swears Glenn. “I really enjoyed doing it. I think we all did. It’s something special. ”

Specially scary, too. In fiction, film and concept albums, the Good Ghost never gets much of a look-in. Phenomena’s definitely nightmare stuff.

“You know something?” says Glenn. “Singing all these lyrics, I hope I don’t get any bad karma out of all this, because there’s some horrible things I’m singing about. I don’t really agree with it—I wasn’t paying too much attention to what I was singing until after, when I listened back to the tape—so I hope my life doesn’t change for the bad now. But,” he shrugs, “it’s just a story. A fantasy...”

“I don’t know if this is a statement on life as such,” Tom Galley. “We’re all in a state of coma in the ’80s. Phenomena was never meant to be controversial. It was made to enjoy. If it makes people think or fantasize, that’s fine.”