Solstice guitarist Andy Glass never expected to be playing for Queen Elizabeth II. His band emerged as the spliff-wielding hippie wing of the early 80s British prog revival, and had followed a fairly wayward path ever since. Yet there they were, in 2007, performing in front of the reigning monarch on a makeshift stage at the opening of Milton Keynes football team MK Dons’ brand new stadium, while jazz singer Cleo Laine waited to follow them.
“We’re essentially a Milton Keynes band and they wanted some local representation,” says Glass, whose Hawkwind-roadie ponytail and chilled stoner’s drawl match his band’s laidback but exploratory music. “God knows why they picked us though. But we were invited, and I thought, ‘Yep, definitely.’”
They only played one song, the title track of their early 90s album New Life. But Glass swears he saw HRH digging it. “We’re going at it, and she was, like‘ Whooh! I love this prog rock!’”
He’s kidding. Solstice are unlikely candidates for any kind of royal approval. Rarely has a band been so disinterested in playing the game. Where their one-time peers Marillion became unlikely mid-80s pop stars before settling into their current late-career purple patch, Solstice’s own stop/start 45-year career has been defined by an absence of burning ambition and suspicion of the mainstream music industry.
“I don’t regret having that attitude one bit,” says Glass cheerfully. “We went and sat in front of a couple of big record company desks with a bloke smoking a cigar behind them. We always left thinking, ‘Fuck that, just no.’”
Solstice always were out of step with everything around them. They formed at the very end of the 70s as an instrumental four-piece after the teenage Glass, who had relocated from his native Wales to Aylesbury, was kicked out of his first band for being a pothead.
There were no such issues with Solstice. Their debut gig was put on by a local drug dealer in Berkhamsted. Later shows were no less herbal. “We’d pass around joints between the band and the audience,” says Glass.
Solstice were the missing link between the guitarist’s beloved Yes and Hawkwind – the guitarist lived on a travellers’ site at one point, and their first tour found them travelling in his double-decker caravan pulled by a Bedford horsebox. A resurgent grassroots prog movement saw them lumped in with the likes of Marillion, Pallas, IQ and Twelfth Night.
“We were kind of bitchy about Marillion, and a whole raft of other bands who appeared around that time,” says Glass. “They were our mates, but as far as we were concerned they were doing early Genesis, except not that well. Mind you, we had a singer who sounded like Jon Anderson.”
He’s talking about Sandy Leigh, who sang on Solstice’s 1984 debut album, The Silent Dance, and whose helium-high voice sailed close enough to Yes’s diminutive front-pixie to give copyright lawyers the night sweats. Leigh was the third of eight vocalists who have fronted Solstice down the years, all of them women.
“I’m a huge fan of Joni Mitchell, and of the female voice generally,” says Glass of this distinction between his band and their male-fronted contemporaries. “I’ve never considered not having a female singer in the band.”
It seemed like things were going well for Solstice. They won over prog-heads and Hells Angels alike, played Stonehenge, and even appeared on the cover of Melody Maker. But they were late out of the gate with their debut album – what should have taken two weeks took nine long months due to clashes with their producer. By the time it came out in 1984, the world was moving on from the neo-prog scene.
“We’d changed line-ups and audiences were going, ‘It’s not the same any more,’” says Glass. “So pretty much the last thing we did was Glastonbury in 1985. We knew it was finished.”
Solstice went into hibernation for the rest of the decade. They finally re-emerged with a second album, New Life, in 1992 and a third, Circles, four years later. But prog’s stock had never been lower. “No one was interested,” says Glass.
Things were even worse for the guitarist on a personal level. By his own admission, the 1990s were “a complete fucking trainwreck”. He was in an unhealthy relationship and found an escape in drugs – not just weed but harder stuff.
“What made me feel better was getting out of my head,” he says. “It started with coke and then led into other things. The drugs got bad really quickly, and then you end up with a habit you’ve got to fund every day. Life was a fuck up.”
He pulled himself out of the darkness after meeting fiddle player Jenny Newman. She needed a guitarist for her ceilidh band, and a professional relationship gradually turned into a romantic one. “That was a huge turning point,” he says. “I’d hit bottom, and for whatever reason, she was there for me.”
Today, the pair are married, and Newman plays alongside him in Solstice. Glass had reactivated the band in 2006, but their career remained stop-start over the next decade and a half. “Raising kids, putting food on the table,” he says. “Real life.”
2010’s Spirit (“OK”) was followed by 2013’s Prophecy (“Better”). “But the chemistry wasn’t working,” says Glass. “We weren’t doing fuck all.”
That changed with 2020’s Sia and the recruitment of Jess Holland, the latest in a long line of female Solstice singers. “She had no interest in progressive rock, but she got what we were doing,” says Glass. “She’s extraordinary. Those of us in the band who are knocking on a bit, we’re like energy vampires now – we feed off her.”
Holland’s galvanising qualities have led to two more albums, 2022’s Light Up and this year’s Clann. They’ve filled the gaps between studio records with live albums and DVDs, and The Silent Dance is being reissued on vinyl. Maybe if they’d have had this kind of ambition all those years ago, they could have had Marillion’s career.
“No chance,” says Glass. “I wouldn’t change anything about those early days. If we’d followed the major label path we’d have been fucked. We’re high-functioning now, as opposed to dysfunctioning."
Clann and the reissue of The Silent Dance are both available from Solstice's Bandcamp page.
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