COLLIDER PROJECT
ENTER LIVE
The music in the room.
From a first Hazel O’Connor concert, through years of marvelling at Prince live, to years playing on stage, live music has always been an inspiration.
Playing it. Watching it. Learning from it.
His first concert was Hazel O’Connor at eleven years old — an experience that helped set him on his musical path.
It started something.
From then on, live music became a constant.
Christian was lucky enough to see Prince live seven times. U2. Bowie. Paul McCartney. The Rolling Stones. Radiohead. Morrissey. R.E.M. — and many more.
For Christian, concerts have never been simply entertainment.
“I find concerts entertaining, inspirational and educational.”
Watching great musicians perform teaches you things a record can’t.
How an arrangement changes in front of an audience. How dynamics can transform a song. When to play and when not to play. How musicians communicate with each other. How a performer can command a room.
How a song you’ve heard countless times can suddenly become something different when people are playing it in front of you.
And occasionally you see somebody operating on another level entirely.
For Christian, that was Prince.
“The word genius gets used too freely. Prince genuinely was the real deal.”
Songwriter. Singer. Multi-instrumentalist. Performer. Dancer. Producer. Arranger. Bandleader. Genre breaker and creator.
Prince was the consummate professional.
He could do everything.
After seeing him perform seven times, Christian still regards Prince as the master of playing live.
But watching was only half of the story.
From school bands and Frontline onwards, Christian has always loved being on the other side of that relationship as well.
Playing live exposes a song.
There is nowhere to hide behind another edit or another mix. You discover whether something actually moves, whether a quiet section can hold people’s attention and whether a song has the energy you thought it did when you wrote it.
That became important again years later with Ragazzi.
Playing with Andy Clayton and Darren Pennington allowed songs to develop in a room, through the instinctive interaction that only happens between musicians.
Time Wasting Time began that way.
Christian started playing a bass line. Andy joined with a funky guitar part. Darren found a melody on saxophone.
Christian loved the groove and energy, so recorded the jam on his phone.
He took it home and wrote the song around it.
Each time they subsequently played the song, Andy would jam the guitar solo differently. Christian eventually asked him to nail it down and really make it his own.
Andy did exactly that, recording the finished solo in GarageBand.
After Andy passed away, Christian remembered the recording. Andy’s wife Gill found it, and that performance was eventually incorporated into the Collider Project version of Time Wasting Time.
It is a literal piece of the live musical relationship preserved inside a record.
That experience also shaped Christian’s approach to recording.
Even when every instrument is played by one person, the parts still need to interact. Rhythm, dynamics, melody and musical space all matter.
The lessons learned playing with other musicians don’t disappear simply because the recording process becomes a solo undertaking.
Christian still loves playing live.
But Collider Project doesn’t have to do everything at once.
Right now, the priority isn’t getting the project onto a stage.
It’s making the third Collider Project album everything it can be.
There will always be another room.
For now, there’s another record to make.
THE MUSIC IN THE ROOM.
