MrCox wrote:
Yeah, that's quite strange. Even on "Tangents" ... every Virgin album was included with at least one or two compositions, but "Cyclone" was missing completely.
That makes you think what Edgar Froese may think of this album.
I think it's WAY too underrated. The three compositions may not be the best ones TD ever wrote, but I enjoy this album very much. Some parts of "Bent Cold Sidewalk" may be a bit too hippie-esk (considering what was going on with Punk Rock at the same time!), but I have no problem with that.
I guess "Cyclone" simply came at the wrong time, a TD electronic prog rock album must have seemed dated then. And as I wrote elsewhere I don't mind the vocals at all. They're quite nice and somehow very strange ... something completely different.
Edgar's thoughts on Cyclone (once again from Inkey$ 10 'audio tape' magazine):
DE-"Meanwhile back at the hotel Jeanette asked about Peter Baumann's decision to leave the band and the arrival of Steve Jolliffe and Klaus Krieger for the Cyclone album and subsequent tour."
EF-"The problem simply was that we could not for some reason agree to some decisions Peter Baumann made in 77 and (it) was shortly after the second part of the American tour. He wanted to live in New York and then he wanted to do that; and wanted to do that. He had a certain type of lifestyle which is totally the opposite of our one, which is ok, we did respect that and we were together for about 6 years, and so a lot of things went fine, some others didn't. But when we split it, there was a .recording session announced, there was a release date of a record, there was tour planned. So there were not so many choices to go with. So I did know Steve from 66-67-68, sometime around this period and I know he is a very fine musician and a fine character and so I thought let's call him, let's get him into the band. He plays keyboards as well (it) shouldn't be any problem with a good musician you can improvise right away and Chris did know Klaus (Krieger). So we brought them into the band, so ok let's have a rehearsal session for a couple of months. Ok once again the truth. The thing was when we produced Cyclone, I've never said that before, but anyway, we made all the ground tracks which we didn't want to make. We wanted to make a piece of music the same way we did before, you know?. Sit down and improvise, but because we did not know so well each other, we just had basic tracks all the time. We could do what ever we liked (but) we were always running into basic tracks!. Everybody said 'Ok that's tracks, it's like somebody wants to sing on it!' and we said no it's not possible, you're crazy! we never use words. But because of that pressure we had from all angles then one day I remember Steve came into the studio and said 'look, I wrote some lyrics, I don't know if-blah, blah, blah', I said ok try it, but sorry we definitely don't use it, but try it. It was a very delicate situation and he did and he tried and it least was a mixture of being suppressed by time factors and not knowing what to do (or) where to go; and so in the end it turned out to be halfway what we wanted. But the Cyclone record it's still one of those pieces of music where we are still totally unsure about!"
CF-“It was an exception”
EF-“Totally an exception”
CF-"There are a lot of people which only like one album of Tangerine Dream, that's Cyclone”
EF-“That’s correct”
CF-“I mean it's an experiment which was a half failure. But it was an experiment and we had not tried doing experiments and it was maybe such as Paul McCartney maybe would do experiments doing a song without vocals."
(General laughter)
