The Nektar Project

"Their first album is a incredible piece of spacey–progressive with great space–sound on both guitar and organ. The album has a concept, and all the songs floats into each other. There's not much meaning in pointing out highlights, cause this is one of those albums that works best in its entirety. Listen to it from start to end, and you'll surely get a very enjoyable journey to the centre of the eye! Especially side one has some awesome instrumental parts, that will appeal to any fan of space–progressive. Side two is also great, with some great mellotron on "Burn out my eyes".  A great debut from a great band," Tommy Shoenbergs.

Mick, "I'll start with the title....
Journey to the Centre (center) of the Eye (I)...
The bracketed inclusions were the alternatives... We chose the British spelling, and the optical references because it all started with Asronauts' Nightmare, which was a stand alone piece written a few months after we'd all seen Kubricks' 2001 in 1970. The ideas stemmed from my lightshow with the Pretty Things for their SF Sorrow, a precursor to the Whos' "Tommy", both of which were acclaimed "Rock Operas", ... so Mo and I had discussed the idea of a "Space Opera" based on the Prophecy piece "Oddysey" (Oddysee)which I'd done a lightshow to in 1969 when we first met.

Well Journey never did include Oddysey, as we built the album pretty much in order, and Oddysey never seemed to quite fit. "Countenance" was a segue that Taff and Roye built up and I titled, likewise "The Nine Lifeless Daughters of the Sun", as they are both intrumentals for which the title provides the picture... (count the bass riff notes.. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9.)

The astronaut had just left Earth on the verge of nuclear destruction, been hi-jacked by a flying saucer, looked back on an almost dead solar system and now entered Warp Oversight, where the starship is in hyperspace, a place without time or space, which was influenced by our exposure to Karl-Heinz Stockhausen in 1970.. we all sat central to one of his multi-channeled live sound exhibitions, and were blown away. When we returned to our cellar in Seeheim, the lads dabbled around with sounds that could be obtained from each instrument with very few actual notes, and it fit into the story at just the right time.. THEN, Dream Nebula whips you out of that cacophanous and unmusical area into lush tones and descriptive lyrics with the intent of bringing the listener back into focus with reality, and therin is the (I) mentioned when I started.. as it is really all just a fantastic journey to the center of yourself... but I DID have an EYE as a lightshow slide,... so why not play with it?.. so we did.

Everything was "perfect" in the Dream Nebula, yet the hi-jacked astronaut had witnessed the demise of mankind, and didn't want to "see" such beauty, so it all became a dream in his mind once his wish to be blinded was granted in "Burn out my Eyes". His other senses took over for his meeting with the "all seeing eye". I should interject that my father was blind, I'd grown up as his eyes when we were together, so this definitely had a subliminal influence on the lyrics and storyline (recurring in RTF of course)of Journey. Anyway, substitute the Eye for God... and he meets his maker, gets to see everything through his mind, realises that everything on Earth was in the eyes of THE maker, and (like Recycled) it's up to mankind to make a difference. We were in our twenties when we wrote Journey, and the 1970 world was a very different place, the nuclear fears at that time... Vietnam, Russia, China.. who knew? Jimi & Janis died, the Beatles broke up, and the freedom of the sixties gave us poetic licence to express our feelings about our possible future. Either way, it was an ambitious first release that set the tone for others!"