“Our producer played the intro to Nevermore and I was just blown away”: How U.K. became Witherfall guitarist Jake Dreyer’s prog heroes

U.K. and Witherfall's Jake Dreyer — (Image credit: Getty Images / Stephanie Cabral)

The chance discovery of U.K. had a massive impression on Witherfall guitarist Jake Dreyer and his band. Sharing his passion for Allan Holdsworth and Bill Bruford in particular, he tells Prog where the uninitiated should start with the supergroup that lasted from 1977 to 1980.

“The producer we worked with on the first Witherfall album was a huge Allan Holdsworth nut and was like, ‘Have you ever heard U.K. before?’ He played the intro to Nevermore – the acoustic passage – and I was just fucking blown away. I just had to go and listen to the entire eponymous debut. And while I was playing it, I thought, ‘These drums are sick, too!’ And that was Bill Bruford.

The second album, Danger Money, was more pop-prog, to my ears at least. Except perhaps the last two tracks; they put their epic songs at the end of both of their albums. And I love them – they’re accessible enough, but they also have a lot of that technical, instrumental stuff that really keep the ears interested. We try to end our records with our biggest, most bombastic and most proggy stuff as an exclamation mark – the kind of stuff they’d do.

In Witherfall we really try to emulate a lot of the unison lines they have going on during their instrumental sections. There’s something so bombastic when everybody’s playing lines together. But also, they had a lot of counterpoint as well; you can hear a bit of that classical influence.

It doesn’t seem that they’re throwing in techniques for the sake of technique

They’d always have those songs that took you on a really big musical journey. You have Dream Theater doing that stuff now, but back then nobody was doing it as technically proficiently as they were. In the songwriting, too, it all makes sense; it doesn’t seem that they’re throwing in techniques for the sake of technique.

I would recommend Danger Money if someone was more of fan of Asia, because it’s an easier one to listen to. But if it was a musician – where I’d want to show the sheer proficiency of these musicians – it would be Nevermore and Mental Medication from the first album. Nevermore is a really good gateway song to get you started on your journey with them.”

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Julian Marszalek is the former Reviews Editor of The Blues Magazine. He has written about music for Music365, Yahoo! Music, The Quietus, The Guardian, NME and Shindig! among many others. As the Deputy Online News Editor at Xfm he revealed exclusively that Nick Cave’s second novel was on the way. During his two-decade career, he’s interviewed the likes of Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne, and has been ranted at by John Lydon. He’s also in the select group of music journalists to have actually got on with Lou Reed. Marszalek taught music journalism at Middlesex University and co-ran the genre-fluid Stow Festival in Walthamstow for six years.