Renaissance is one of the most unique bands in music history. Born from the ashes of The Yardbirds, Renaissance is a classically-inspired folk-rock band that emerged in the 1970s as the perfect vehicle to showcase the stunning, 3-octave voice of Annie Haslam. The band is about to embark on their farewell tour, aptly titled In Gratitude.
Please scroll below for the MisplacedStraws Annie Haslam interview –
On if the tour will touch on all aspects of Renaissance’s career – I wish it could. We’ve got such a large volume of great songs over the years that whenever Michael Dunford and I sat down there to plan the tour and the set list, every time it’s like, “Well, we know we’ve got to please the audience, but we can’t go over two hours”, and then usually 90 minutes, something like that. A lot of our great songs are 10 minutes long. That was a little bit of a dilemma every time we did a tour. We’re doing a few songs we haven’t done for a while. We’re doing “Prologue”, “Carpet of the Sun”, “Ocean Gypsy”, we’ll be doing “Mother Russia”, which we did take out when the Ukraine situation started, only because we didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, side with anybody or anything. So we decided that we should put that back in. So “Mother Russia” is back in. Then we’ve got “Island”, which was the song that got me the job with the band. “Song for All Seasons” we’re doing a song from the album Tuscany that came out in 2001. It’s a fabulous song, really. A real Renaissance song and it’s up-tempo and really exciting. We did do it actually in Japan when we played there in, when was it 2001 actually. That was when we toured Japan.
So, what else are we doing? “Forever Changing”, which is a very beautiful song that Terry Sullivan and Betty Thatcher wrote together. He wrote it about his father who just passed away. Terry also wrote the beginning section of “Song for All Seasons”, which I didn’t know about until last year That is too much, I’ve got too much else going on. Anyway, so we’re doing that because we haven’t done that since. “Young Prince and Princess” from Scheherazade. It would be too long to do the whole piece because that would take up half the show. We decided to do the love song from Scheherazade.
On whether she was aware of the band when she auditioned – Never heard of them. No, it’s interesting. That’s an interesting question. That’s an obvious question, but nobody’s ever asked me that. I was singing in a cabaret group, that was my first professional job in London, for about six months. I loved every minute of it. Singing standards and things with three other guys, and we were called The Gentle People. We played music for when people were eating dinner. There was a break when the main show was on, with all different kind of acts on and that was the break for us. Then we’d go back on for people to dance to. We’d play music for people to dance to. I loved it there. I loved the people. It was so much fun. Then there’s David Gardner, who’s the guitarist. He said to me, “Annie, I’ve just found this ad in the Melody Maker, and I think you’re wasted here. It’s great having you in the band and everything, but your voice is different, it’s unique. You deserve to be in something different.” And he said, “I’ve got a feeling about this”.
So, I called up, and the band were playing in Europe at the time. So I bought the album, the first album that they had “Kings and Queens”, that one fantastic album. I learned everything on it and I loved “Island”. That was my favorite, and that’s what they asked me when I went to the audition. They asked me to sing “Island”
On the changes the band went through after she joined – Well, it was a bit confusing. The audition was at New Year’s Eve 1970. The day after, the first, January 1st, 1971, I got the phone call “You’ve got the job”. When I joined, it was a six-piece band, and it was a male singer, Terry Crowe. I wasn’t the lead singer. I was basically quite, almost like a backing singer. I sang two songs, “Island” on stage and another one called “Face of Yesterday”, and then backing vocals for all the other songs. But, I didn’t know any different at that time. I just loved the music.
But then Miles Copeland came into the picture. Who became our manager, and he could see the potential in the band with me and John Tout. He just said, “We have to change all this”. So, he fired everybody except me and John Tout. Then John Tout and I, we had to build a band, Because we hadn’t recorded anything ourselves, other than what the first band did.
So when we did the auditions, we auditioned a lot of people, a lot of bass players, a lot of drummers, and we played “Prologue” because it was the easiest one to show the difficult parts of the band. As well as for me that I use quite a few octaves in that song as well. So it gives a very good idea. Although it’s not really, it is a song. It’s a vocalise, but it was enough. We have lots of bass players and then Jon Camp arrived and he obviously fit in and he was playing a Rickenbacker bass. The sound of the Rickenbacker bass, there’s nothing like it. It’s got its own sound. Bassists don’t do anything for me if they’re just thud, thud, thud, thud. I like a musical bass that Jon used to play it really like a guitar almost. It fitted the music perfectly. Funnily enough, I’d been to an audition in a band, and I think it was the New Seekers, and Jon was in that band, and I went for an audition. But I didn’t get the job. So, isn’t that funny?
So, anyway, Jon joined, and then the next week, the next thing we had to do was to find a drummer, and we went to a lot of drummers as well, my gosh. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. That was a drum for me. When Terry (Sullivan) arrived, you could tell that he’s more, more of an orchestra drummer. Has a good, really good feel for all kinds of music, particularly classical music, of course. But I think apparently we were told this afterwards, Jon gave Terry a tip, and he said, “If you can play the hi-hat in this part, and perfectly in time, you get the job”. When it came to that part, whatever it was we were playing, we might have actually, we might have learned, when Jon joined, we might have been able to play some other things rather than just voice and piano. So when we came to this bit, Terry knew what to do and he did and he got the job. But Terry and Jon they really got on together very well. When you’re a musician, it’s different than from being a singer. When you’re playing with drums, you’ve got to be tuned into the drums as well You can’t just stand out front and do your own thing You’ve got to be looking at the drum and get the feel, same as the bass player and everything. The bass player has to really look at the drums. Everybody’s got to look at the drums. Some people don’t. That’s why the bands don’t succeed, but yeah, everything worked out,
Michael Dunford had left the band at that point and decided Miles wanted him to stay on as a writer, which was with Betty Thatcher. So they carried on doing that. That’s when we brought in a guitarist, electric guitarist called Mick Parsons. He auditioned, he was Cornish actually. What a lovely, lovely human being. Brilliant, brilliant guitarist. Acoustic guitar, electric guitar, phenomenal. Lovely personality, nice looking. Everything about him was amazing. My parents were living in Cornwall at the time also. When we gave Mick the, the job, Miles and I went down to Cornwall. I think he came up on the train, but we decided to drive him back. We drove him back to Boding where he lived, and then Miles and I went to see my mom and dad, and then we would pick Mickey up the next day. That was the plan. He’d get all his stuff together. But what happened was, that night we found out in the morning, he went out to celebrate with his fans and got killed in a car crash. So it was heartbreaking. It was for many reasons. His whole life was cut off in his early twenties. You can’t make this stuff up, can you really? You never know what’s going to happen. And why did it happen to him? He’s such a lovely person. He was so excited, he would have been fabulous in the band. So anyway, we had to find somebody else because we had a tour lined up and an album to do.
So we found Rob Hendry. And Rob Hendry ended up after us in The Pretty Things, I believe. He was with us. He was a good guy, a vegetarian. I’ll always remember that. I wasn’t vegetarian yet at that time, but he was a good guy. He was fun and everything and he was a good player. He was a bit heavier. I dealt with it, but it wasn’t for me. It didn’t quite fit. It didn’t quite fit the sound. But he was with us, he did the album with us, Prologue. Then we decided that we would bring Michael Dunford back in the band, playing acoustic guitar. He came back in and he played, I think he played electric guitar in one song, but it was basically, he rejoined the band as an acoustic guitarist. Which was perfect, really. It just blended so well.
On the impact of Michael Dunford and Betty Thatcher as writers – Betty was a poet, she lived in Cornwall too. Michael was writing with Betty before I joined the band, I think. They got some kind of relationship. He was connected to her by Jim McCarty, because Jim was a good friend of hers as well. She’s very much like me as far as when she writes, when she wrote anything she would go into a room and have a particular chair that she’d sit down in, and she said she used to plug in. So it’s like she channeled at me, she channeled at me. There’s no doubt she was that kind of person.
Because I do that when I paint, I don’t think of anything unless I’m doing a commission. So I get all this stuff comes in and I don’t I don’t plan colors. I never know what’s coming. Betty did the same thing. All those amazing, amazing lyrics that came out, There were A couple that she based around my life, like “Trip to the Fair” and “Ocean Gypsy” were the two big ones. Michael’s melodies were just fantastic. I don’t know what else to say. They were just perfect for the band.
Jon Camp did write some things as well. I think he was one of the writers on “Day of the Dreamer”, I think. Then of course John Tout did. Terry did as well. I just helped with the vocal arrangements and odd times, very rarely I’d come up with a melody that worked. But not enough to be paid for it.
On if the band was aware of their large following in the eastern US – Of course New York was huge as well for us. Well, Miles Copeland is American, and the first thing he wanted to do with us, to start off with, as soon as we changed the band, we did the first one on EMI Sovereign, Prologue, and then the next one was, was with Sire Records, it was Warner Brothers so whichever, but Sire Records with Seymour Stein. I remember making a call in the middle of the, because I lived with Miles for a couple of years, and I remember we got a call in the middle of the night to say, “We want to sign up Renaissance”, and “Ashes are Burning”, that was the first thing we did. That was the big one.
But we were very fortunate because in the seventies, a lot of the radio stations, the college stations, and even the ones in the big cities, the DJs could play whatever they wanted. We were a favorite on WNEW FM New York with Alison Steele, who in the end became a very close friend of mine. They played a lot. Last night I did an interview on Sirius on the Beatles channel. with Dennis Elsas from WNEW FM was asking me the questions, which is like going back right to the 70s. Very interesting. Then of course in Philadelphia, we had Ed Sciaky another avid fan who, oh my gosh, never stopped playing us. It was those two stations that really started. They did it with Yes and Genesis. We could play long songs, we were the pioneers along with the other guys, Yes and Genesis and the Moody Blues. And it was an exciting time and there weren’t so many restrictions on what you could do, what you couldn’t do.
On if she feels Renaissance has accomplished all she set out to do – I think everything that we’ve ever done is a big gift to me. Not that I usually strive for things, in the 70s when we did the orchestras and all that. When it came, when we re-reformed in 2009, Mickey (Dunford) and I kept saying, “Oh God, I wish we could play with an orchestra again”.
Actually, I think it was around 2010, I got a letter from the managing director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Ian Maclay a lovely guy. And he said,” I wanted to invite you we’ve been talking about the next season and we’d love to work with you again”. Because they love the music apart from anything else. Because we did, we toured with them. It was Birmingham, Manchester, and the Albert Hall that we did with the Royal Philharmonic. It was all very well, everybody wants to play with them. It was really, touching that they would contact us and say, “Let’s do some shows”. But of course we have to pay for it. In the 70s the record label paid for that stuff. We didn’t have a major record deal to do that. We did think about maybe doing a a Kickstarter or something, but I didn’t want to lose my house There’s no guarantee for something like that. We budgeted everything out for a 35-piece orchestra and had a meeting with him, me and Rave Tesar who is in the band now. We had a meeting with him in 2015 just before we came back to America after a tour. We thought, “Well, let’s write it all down and then, and see what we can do”. We had a lovely meeting. Rave and I came back and we looked at everything and we said, “It’s too risky” and then all of a sudden Rave said, “Why don’t we form our own orchestra?”
He said, “I know some great musicians”. One of them actually, Joe Deninzon, just joined Kansas. He was in our Renaissance Chamber Orchestra. We created this ten-piece orchestra. But this was after Michael died. It’s such a shame that he missed this. Because, when we did it, I was thinking, “Oh my God, this is what we wanted all along, was to be able to play with an orchestra again.” But, unfortunately, in 2012, he passed away. Of course, we didn’t do ours until 2017. That was incredible.
I thought when we were planning it, I thought, “You know what? I think maybe I could incorporate my paintings”. So we had a painting for each song behind the orchestra enlarged. It was 12 foot by 24 foot and looked amazing. Oh my God. It’s fantastic. So if I was realizing my dream. Not that I even knew that I had a dream because I didn’t start painting until 2002, actually. I’ve never really planned anything out. I was just very fortunate, I guess, being in the right place at the right time, or whatever. Because if I hadn’t joined, if I hadn’t gone and done that show in the Strand, I would never have met David Gardner, who’s the one who found the ad in the magazine.
On how she would like the band to be remembered – I think that we’re a unique band. I think that it’s the kind of music that brings people together, particularly when we do live shows. I’ve been told that a lot of people have met their wives at our concerts. It’s just that kind of music that makes you want to hug the next person. A bit like flower power in a way. I shouldn’t have said that, but you know what I mean. It’s very feel-good music. It’s very calming. I think my voice fits it perfectly. I think that’s part of the whole thing about the musical entity. It’s a very calming and healing Experience to listen to us and my voice.
On future plans – If people are interested in the tour all the dates are on our website, renaissancetouring.com. If anybody’s interested in my art, I have my website, anniehaslam.com. We’re also on Facebook. We seem to get, I think we get more action on Facebook, to be honest. I think than the website. Who knows what’s going to happen? I’ve got a Christmas show coming up. I do one every year. It’s the Sellersville Theatre in Pennsylvania and it holds about 350 people and it’s like me going back to my cabaret days because half the night’s laughing. We have so much fun. It’s incredible. We do mostly traditional Christmas. We have a Rave on keyboards and we have Geoffrey Langley on keyboards. And then we have John Arbo that’s played in the band a few times and he plays upright bass on it. So the sound is wonderful. Again, it’s bringing that little string quartet kind of sound in. Oh, we have a drummer as well. It’s Charlie, usually, or Frank Pagano, one of those two. That’s going to be that. Then the end of the year, the next year, who knows what might happen?
I did a show with Rick Wakeman earlier this year. That was fantastic and a great combination. Then I also was a guest with Asia. The band Asia came back and I joined them to sing this song called “In the End”, which I recorded with Icon, which was Geoff Downs and John Wetton. I guess it was the catalyst, that song so when I found out that John needed help, I went over to England a couple of times and managed to get him into rehab. That’s why the song means so much to me, I guess and everybody else involved with John, because that was the major song. I got up and sang it with Asia. It was amazing. And Thijs (van Leer) from Focus played flute. Geoff Downs was there. Harry Whitley is the new singer. He’s brilliant. Phenomenal singer, and also John Mitchell guitar, incredible guitarist. Then one of the best drummers, if not the best drummer in the world, Virgil Donati.
It all started at John’s Memorial Tribute that I went to and I sang the song there as well in England last year. It all started there, so that was very exciting. Yeah, it’s like just bubbling over now, it’s just so good and the reports, reviews and everything. And it was great to be part, it was great to be asked, I was thrilled. Who knows what the future holds. Let’s hope it’s all good stuff for everybody. All over the world.
