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THE JOURNEY ZONE
http://www.journey-zone.com
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Jrnydv.Com’s
Exclusive Telephone Interview
with Robert Fleischman
January 8, 2003
Part Four: England, where Pink Floyd built him a Wall
Robert followed up on the release of Perfect Stranger by forming a new band, a band of his own—Channel. This is a band that few Journey fans have heard, and it seemed like an appropriate place to take the conversation.
DG: Tell us about your time with Channel.
RF: The time with Channel was after my Perfect Stranger album. I’d just got through touring with Van Halen. And Tony Berg, who was at Virgin records, and later on was at Geffen records—he had a lot to do with Beck—he signed Beck. Anyway, he later on became an A&R guy, and in the band he was the guitar player. And we got along really well, I mean he was into art, and I’m really into art, so we used to go to art galleries together, and we had a lot in common, and the music for Channel was very, you know, poppy, and sort of, I don’t know—very European-sounding, in a sense. And we had this—we wanted to do a record, and we went to England to record this album, and we ended up at Pink Floyd’s studios, called Brittania Row. And we recorded there, and then one day the bobbies came knocking on the door and told us that we had to turn it down because there were complaints from people and we couldn’t understand—I mean, Pink Floyd records here, and we were getting complaints from the neighbors. You know, bizarre! And so what happened was that they had this huge room where they had a snooker table—do you know what a snooker table is?
DG: Like giant billiards.
RF: Yeah, it’s like giant billiards. And so it was this huge room. And I go “Has anybody ever recorded drums in here?” And they went “No, we never record drums in here,” and I go “Well I’d like to record drums in here,” and they go “We’ll see,” and so we got the drums all set up there, and we had ‘em all miked and we were tracking, and that’s when the bobbies came. And so what was happening was the drums were leaking out of that room, out into the streets. So we’d traveled all over the world, and now it’s London. So the studio decided to build an extra wall on the backside of the building. So I thought that was a pretty funny story—we go there, and Pink Floyd built us a wall!
DG: Did you actually interact with the members of Floyd at that time?
RF: No they weren’t around, we just used some of their recording engineers there. And upstairs was a great art studio—was it Hypnosis? What was the name of that great company that made all the album covers? They did all the Pink Floyd album covers? Anyway their graphic place was upstairs and we could just go upstairs. And they had Handmade Films there, which was George Harrison’s production company. So I used to just go upstairs and check out all the stuff, all the album covers and all The Wall props there, all the dummies, and they were all laying around up there, and walking around—it was really cool.
DG: And after Channel you did Vinnie Vincent’s Invasion, and—
RF: And then I went back to England again and played with Asia. I went there and played with them, and that was really great, and it was good because I knew Carl Palmer because we were on the road with him, so I went there and I played with Carl Palmer, and got to play with Steve Howe, and Jeffrey Dunnes and John Whetton, and being in the same room with those guys was just “Wow.”
DG: They’ve written some incredible stuff over the years.
RF: Oh they’ve just—all of them just by themselves, I mean just to sit there and work with Steve Howe on fuckin’ guitar. And I’d gone to concerts and seen Yes and everything, and here I am in the same room with him. I loved it. It was great.
This transcript ©2003 Jrnydv.Com. All rights reserved.
Last Updated 02 July, 2007 (DHG)
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