I eschew labels.

This is not deliberate perfidy. My listening and enjoyment of music since the first time I recall it entering my psyche has been eclectic; the following examples are in no particular order, but roughly consecutive – Scottish dance music, funny songs, early pop, “classical” (due to a school trip to a concert at age 11 – do they do that now? If they hadn’t, I suspect I might never have got to writing this), a gift of “The Reader’s Digest Festival of Light Classical Music” (The wonderful sweep of Ravel’s “La Valse“ comes to mind). Then came early rock (Dave Clark 5, the Stones and the whole panoply of mid 60s bands – through Pink Floyd, Hendrix, to Soft Machine, Caravan and the whole Canterbury scene)

Concurrently, having been bowled over by Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and Bartok’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta”, I started listening to anything avant-garde: the more dissonant the better – (some of it I can’t even listen to now), all the time putting together clusters of notes which sounded great to me, for which the school music teacher (who loathed most things written after 1900) berated me mercilessly; writing songs, often based on what I’d just heard – semi-Byrds pastiches, riffs a la Cream, but using curious time-signatures, all the time cloaked in the most obscure lyrics I could muster (I’d been very taken by TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” during ‘A levels’, on the basis that it was pretty-nigh incomprehensible, so I figured I could write about personal things without anyone even having a glimmer that it was me. )

Basically,  I reveled playing with notes, chords, and words, their meanings and their sounds. (Isn’t that we we all do? Visual Artists fundamentally love playing with colours, shapes and texture, carpenters with grain, textures of wood, dancers with movement and shapes etc etc)

When I came on to the 70s I was drawn by bands that worked with bigger structures: Yes, Gentle Giant, Focus, and then on to post-punk experimental bands like This Heat and later Scott Walker.

The writing became more focussed. As a teenager, all my lyrics had been angst-ridden rants, either that or borrowing the formulae of pop songs (“I love you. I’ll die if you don’t accept me” etc), now, having been exposed to Mike Nesmith, David Ackles, Noel Coward, Ivor Cutler and a wide range of others, my aim was, if I was going to write something personal (ultimately, the seed of everything, apart from the formulaic, is personal or personalising someone else’s experience), it could be done in a way so it could speak personally to a listener (I’ve been gratified by after-show comments where an audience member says “I know exactly what you mean”)

So, I traverse many styles of music. The style depends on a couple of things: what the song is trying to say, or, if the lyrics come later, a riff or tune which has entered the noddle and refused to go away, or it might be purely a mood I’m trying to express. It changes with every new song. However, from what I’ve been told, there does seem to be a constant which one might call a Bryce song.

I hope you get something out of these songs and tunes, be they labelled rock, experimental, elegiac, folk, pop, music-hall, jazz ,or just plain daft. If you don’t, that’s OK.