Anthony Phillips!!

Hello Floydians!

A couple of weeks ago I went to a record store that was closing down and so they were selling CDs at incredibly low prices. I thought it was just the opportunity to buy one of those CDs I always wondered about but never really tried in case they were not worth the money. I bought an Anthony Phillips Anthology and it IS worth the money.

I was already very deep into early Genesis (I even bought the Archives Volume 1) and I had some stuff by Steve Hackett but I had never listened to Anthony Phillips before and I was missing a lot. He's got some similarities with Steve Hackett in his approach to the acoustic/Spanish guitar in a classical way but he's also a very proficient piano/keyboard player (some of his albums are entirely based on keys) so he's got more versatility. Just imagine a style based on songs like "More Fool Me", "For Absent Friends" or the softer parts in the suite "Supper's Ready" (above all the ones where 12 strings and piano dominate) mixed with the style King Crimson shows in albums like "Lizard" and with a heavy dose of medieval and classical composition.

I've been so gladly surprised by this new "discovery" that just yesterday I bought at a very low price as well his first album "The Geese and the Ghost" and it is really, really beautiful. The music has an evocative quality that takes you to a different place, a more beautiful one. In this album you can listen to plenty of acoustic, classical, 12 string guitars, dulcimers, mellotrons, pianos, oboes, flutes... Phil Collins sings in two songs, John Hackett (Steve's brother) plays the flutes and Mike Rutherford plays also guitars and basses and composes along with Phillips half of the album.

If you like complex but also "listenable" and delicate music with a classical flavour look for Anthony Phillips records. They're amazing.