Marc Hadley's new album, out now!
The geometry of five
Musical phrasing is often executed by human fingers in groups of four, yet Nature bestowed five fingers on the hand—a digit echoed in the whale’s flipper and the bat’s wing. We see this five-fold symmetry in the starfish and the sea urchin; because no segment point faces another, they possess a stable structure with no central fault line: hard to break.
This record was inspired by my time playing with Phil Miller, who had a built-in preference for the road less-travelled, thus he might choose to write a 5/4 melody rather than a 4/4. My connection to Phil came via bassist Jack Monck; the first bassist in one of the Canterbury origin bands, Delivery. After decades of orbiting one another, Phil, Jack, the late Paul Dufour, and I finally formed a quartet, recording a studio demo in 2016.
Following Phil’s death in 2017, I was left with a sense of unfinished business. We had a collection of tunes to which Phil had been a generous contributor, including the enigmatically challenging piece he called Thing in 5. To capture Phil’s lifetime of fluid, evolving influence felt like a creative and emotional attempt at “cutting water”—trying to impose shape on an element that inherently resists it. I’ve felt at times with my own writing that I’m actually fishing for something I didn’t conceive but already exists—it just doesn’t want to linger in one place and time very long.
The process of "shaping the fluid" or perhaps “nailing jelly to a wall” began in Penzance with engineer Dare Mason, who handled a complex mix of over 100 tracks for Willem Van Droog’s tune, Amazonia, on his venerable Trident console. While the project was interrupted by political upheaval and the isolation imposed by Covid 19, the creative stream still trickled along. I recorded a solo improvisation of Phil's classic song Calyx at home, and between lockdowns quickly laid down my Note Whisperer arrangement at Damian Rodd's studio in Falmouth.
As studios closed and collaborators shifted, the project base ebbed and flowed between Penzance and Falmouth. I found a new production home with Robin Tyndale-Biscoe at The Old Lemonade Factory and a rhythmic anchor in jazz/prog drummer Tom Jackson. While the pandemic thwarted a trip to Italy to record Richard Sinclair’s vocals, serendipity led us to Louisa Edmondson, whose voice brought a lush quality to several tracks
Secret Island and Sky finally found their definitive forms, while Green World was reimagined with Martin Bowie’s Gibson L5. Meanwhile Away with the Fairies—inspired by the primeval woods of West Cornwall—was beset by unaccountable mishaps: the project once vanished into a digital black hole, and had to be rebuilt from stem fragments. During mixdown, track levels would alter randomly. Strangely, the final mix was Logic project version 13, the tempo is 113 BPM, and the runtime is 6:13. Cutting water or herding cats?
As the project neared completion in 2025, I included On My Mind (previously released on The Relatives album Virtually in 2013) —the last recording on which Phil and Richard Sinclair appear together. I saved Phil’s Yours for a Fiver (originally just named "Thing in five") for last. Its demanding melody required much practice. We finally—in between Soft Machine gigs—captured the spirit of the piece at Phil’s one-time home in Dalston, with Fred T Baker playing Phil’s Yamaha semi-acoustic through Phil's small Russian valve amp.
This album has taken me eight years to complete. On one level it reflects an accident in my life that connected me with one of Britain’s more remarkable and prolific musicians. Some of the material here is his, some of it is the result of collaboration between him and me, some of it was shared interests, particularly Jazz—although in some ways, Miller was a rock guitarist too. Some of it belongs to Jack and Willem, who were also influenced by him from their teenage years. Tribute album? Not exactly. For decades I made my own music drawing on the talents of so many of the musicians whose paths have crossed mine, and inspired by a wide world of different genres. How anybody would categorise this collection I really don’t know. It’s me, but also my friends. In Phil’s wise words, musically, “everything comes from somewhere.”
Recorded by Robin Tyndale-Biscoe and Marc Hadley
at The Old Lemonade Factory, Falmouth, UK and Harbour View, Newlyn
Mastered by Robin Tyndale-Biscoe at Light Vessel Mastering