The worst thing Mrs. Beggs has ever heard

Trifecta - Adam Holtzman, Nick Beggs, Craig Blundell
Picture: Hajo Müller

Nick Beggs, it could be said, takes a somewhat alternative approach to the art of record promotion. “My wife says it’s the worst thing she’s ever heard,” he says of his better half’s view of his new album project, adding: “I want that printed on the front of the record: ‘Ann Beggs - worst thing I’ve ever heard’. Great! Listen to the reaction. Own it!”

Beggs is in ebullient mood talking about Fragments, the debut recording from Trifecta, the trio formed by Beggs, keyboard player Adam Holtzman and drummer Craig Blundell while they were on touring duties with Steven Wilson. The basic pitch - that I am, frankly, wary to describe on the basis of Mrs. B’s verdict - is that they are something of an experimental jazz collaboration born out of extended jams the three musicians noodled away at during soundchecks with Wilson, squirrelling the results away on their phones for future use. Much of the material grew out of Blundell playing something in an odd time signature which intrigued Holtzman enough to take it away to play with at home, which Beggs would find himself doing as well. 

“We’d go into some wormholes,” Beggs says. “We’d split the atom, you know? We were rolling around, playing with different times and weirdness. And it’s not going to be for everyone.” Which is where his wife’s blunt view comes into play. “She’s a Northerner," he explains. “What can I tell you?”. 

The Wilson soundchecks became Trifecta’s sandpit. “Steven doesn’t like wasting time in them - two, three songs at the most before he’s off to preserve his voice. Adam, Craig and I would then hang back and start making a racket. It pissed everyone off because the road crew wanted to turn everything off and go and have their dinner, but we’d be having our ‘jazz club’. I was recording it on my mobile, these little vignettes, and we all agreed that there was something going on.” That didn’t mean that everyone in the touring party thought that what the three were creating was to everyone’s taste, but that didn’t dissuade them from driving forward. “It takes quite a lot of willpower to do that,” Beggs stresses. “When everyone’s saying, ‘Fuck off! That sounds shit!’ Everyone’s an A&R man!”.

‘Writing on the road’ has long been a rock and roll tradition, and thus Fragments began to form while the tour for Wilson’s 2017 album To The Bone progressed. “We just thought, ‘Now, hang on a minute. There’s something here’,” says Beggs. “I’d listen back to these things and send them little bits and say, ‘Listen to this. Listen to what’s happening at one-minute-twenty-three-seconds’. And I’d get back ‘Wow! That’s great - that’s an idea there. Let’s extrapolate it.’ Which is what we did. We started file sharing on the road, just saving the ideas, logging them in the dictaphone of life. When we all got home we all started to expand on these ideas.” This was where the individual creativity kicked in. 

Trifecta’s outline premise might stray dangerously close to Spinal Tap’s Jazz Odyssey, but by Beggs’ own admission it is simply the result of three like-minded good friends having fun and coming up with 15 pieces of intriguing, funky yet still highly accessible “fission” music. “It’s like fusion, only less efficient and more dangerous,” he jokes, referring to the genre that emerged in the late 1960s when the likes of Miles Davis (with whom Holtzman worked), his guitarist John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra appeared to imbibe Jimi Hendrix’s freeform blues and, along with characters like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, started to experiment with jazz as only a nominal root. “If you want a buzz statement,” Beggs says of Trifecta with slight reluctance, “it’s a cross between Weather Report and King Crimson. That’s the way I’d see it…but it is a little bit crass to say that because there’s a lot more to it. There are a lot of touch points, a lot of musical influences.” 

Holtzman, Beggs and Blundell
with Steven Wilson and Dave Kilminster

Beggs’ journey to this point starts, more or less, as a founder-member of Kajagoogoo and key contributor to their uber-hit Too Shy’s radio-monstering rhythms, before embarking on a prolific - some might even say restless - career playing bass and Chapman Stick (more of which later) with former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, Howard Jones, King Crimson and his good friend Wilson, as well as in his own side projects, like Ellis, Beggs & Howard and The Mute Gods. 

He is also a gifted artist, a talent given legs in the last year via another sideline during lockdown of accepting commissions. It has provided a particular perspective on the approach Trifecta has taken. “You can’t just always do the same thing,” he says. “You can’t paint the same picture over and over. You’ve got to make the landscape interesting for the listener. I do, anyway, because I always look at everything like a visual. We were taking all these different ideas and painting different pictures with them.

Fragments is predominantly instrumental but it is far from a series of extended jams, spread over the album’s 45-minute playing time - “just three mates having a laugh”, as Blundell recently described to Prog magazine. “There’s a lot of influences,” Beggs tells me. “One track, Have You Seen What The Neighbours Are Doing? is a response to a track by Ween [featuring drummer Marco Minneman, Beggs’ Mute Gods cohort) called Too Many People In The Neighbourhood. I just loved that track and the idea of it.  It was weird and quizzical and brilliantly executed with a great production aspect to it, so I thought ‘I’m going to write a track that’s a direct response to that’. And it’s really fucking weird.”

Fragments’ sole track with a vocal on it is Pavlov’s Dog Killed Schrodinger’s Cat, originally conceived by Beggs for The Mute Gods. “Adam took it somewhere completely different,” he says. “When I wrote it, it was up-tempo. Adam completely changed the arrangement. When I first played it to him, he said ‘Just give me a little while with it’ and within a few days he’d come up with this really mellow Fender-Rhodes version that just suited the song perfectly. That’s why you work with great musicians, isn’t it? Because they know what to do.” 

As the only immediately commercial track on the album, Pavlov’s Dog… intentionally serves as a seduction to the exotic mix thereafter. “I was talking to [Adam and Craig] about how we should format the record, whether we wanted songs or instrumentals,” reveals Beggs. “We all agreed that we should have one song with lyrics to act as a shoehorn for the fan base or indeed anyone who was interested in it. If it could seduce them into a false sense of security by hearing this semi-pop song, then they’d might want to hear the rest of the record, which is not really anything like it,” he adds, emphasising the contrarian approach the trio have taken.

Picture: Richard Purvis

Another track, The Enigma Of Mr. Fripp, draws inspiration from the King Crimson co-founder’s distinctive guitar sound, which Beggs appropriates on the Chapman Stick, a somewhat esoteric 10-stringed instrument of which he is one of the few exponents (Crimson and Peter Gabriel alumnus Tony Levin being one of the others). The Stick effectively allows bass and harmonic scales to be covered at once, much like all 88 keys on a piano. 

“It’s as symphonic as a piano,” says Beggs. “When I first saw Tony Levin playing it, I didn’t know what the hell was going on either.  I had to listen to the records to sort of distil it. That’s the great thing about the Chapman Stick: it gives any musician - not just bass players - range, because it’s not a bass instrument. It gives any musician the opportunity to expand their understanding and their skillset and do something in an unusual way. There’s loads of really amazing bass players out there,  but not many people using the Stick, though.”

It’s one of the many things that makes the likeable Beggs stand out as unique and at ease in his own skin as any I’ve encountered in the music industry. That said, the experience of the last 18 months rankles, with cancelled tours including the latest with Wilson, which would have seen him playing a sellout show at the O2 Arena, amongst major venues. “All my commitments are up in the air,” he says. “I’ve had two tours cancelled. I have no idea what’s going to happen. None of us do. And, you know, the music industry was coughing up blood before [Covid]. So what it’s actually going to mean for live music and the feasibility of touring, I have no idea. You know, it’s very difficult to take a band out on the road.”

In particular, Beggs doesn’t seem Trifecta touring: “Adam lives in New York and visas are expensive.  Going to Europe is going to be a no-no until the government decides to get its finger out of its arse and do something about it. I don’t really see how and when and if we’d be able to take Trifecta on the road. I’d love to. I really like the idea of doing some kind of filmed performance. I like that idea. But, again, how realistic that is, I have no idea at the minute. We will do another Trifecta album, though, because it was too easy and too much fun. Maybe another two, I have no idea. I like to keep an open mind.” As indeed should the listener. And, possibly, Ann Beggs, though I’m going to shy away from confronting her on it.