The result of their efforts is Seven Moons [Big Daddy], a collection of bluesy, psychedelic-tinged songs that go straight to the heart of what Trower and Bruce are all about. One can’t ignore the earmarks of Cream in Bruce’s bass playing and vocals, and there’s certainly no mistaking the thick, soulful textures that flow from Trower’s Fender Stratocaster—they’re as instantly recognizable today as they were in the 1970s—but the music on Seven Moons could only have been made by players who have a ton of respect for each other’s talents and know how to make it happen in a trio setting. That the songs presented here can remind us of some of the best moments from ’60s and ’70s rock underscores how lucky we are that Robin Trower and Jack Bruce are still eager to kick it down with such conviction. 

Both of you have highly identifiable sounds that would seem to compete for attention. How do you manage to create such a sense of space and openness on this album?
That’s a good question. I think it comes from our individual styles and how we work together. A lot of the songs initially start off with a guitar idea, and Jack, being a hugely sympathetic musician, knows exactly what to play and how to put his voice on top. In Cream, Jack had a little more room to play and space to fill because the guitar was not as structured behind the voice as it was in my original three-piece.

Did hearing Cream shape the way you originally wanted to sound with your own trio?
I’m sure it had an influence on me. Obviously the guitar, bass, and drum thing starts at the Who, so it’s all knocking on from Pete Townshend in a way. Cream added the blues thing, and really made it their own sound, and then Hendrix with Band of Gypsys was another leap down a direction we hadn’t seen before—especially from the guitar playing point of view. I think there were one or two tracks from that album that were the main influences on what I wanted to do. All of the most influential music for me was mainly on live albums. I’m thinking of Ray Charles in Person, B.B. King’s Live at the Regal, James Brown’s Live at the Apollo [1963], and, of course, Band of Gypsys.

Did you ever get to see any of those groups perform?
I was lucky enough to see James Brown in the ’60s when he came to London. That’s still the best thing I’ve ever seen live.

How did you record the tracks for Seven Moons?
We recorded the songs live, although most of the solos were overdubbed and the vocals were added afterwards as well. We found a nice sounding room in a studio in London. It was kind of an old fashioned place with a wood floor, and I was able to play without even having headphones on. It was very much a live feeling for me.

You’ve said in the past that you prefer that your solos be spontaneous. Do you still let the inspiration of the moment guide you when you’re recording leads?
I try and get a thought and feel for the general direction, but I don’t like to pin it down too much because I want my solos to be a happening. For instance, the song “Come to Me” is all live soloing. I wouldn’t have worked anything out on that because it’s basically a funky blues kind of thing. But if the changes are more interesting, I’ll try and get more ideas beforehand. Most of the solos I do, though, I just go in and sort of jam it and hope for the best.

In the past you’ve talked about cranking up Marshalls very loud in the studio. What was your approach this time?
On this album I used these hand-built amplifiers made by Cornell Plexi. The model is the 18/20, and it’s a 20-watt amp with a single 12" speaker. I used two of them linked together. They’re a bit like an early Marshall and very sweet sounding. I didn’t want to play too loud in the room where we’d have to use a lot of baffling or go in a booth or something. I wanted to have it so we could all play in the same room and be comfortable.

Is that the smallest setup you’d typically use in the studio?
Yes, because I’ve found I need two 12s at the minimum to get the sound I want.

You’ve used both Fender and Marshall amps during your career and I suppose you must have used them together at times.
Oh yes. In fact, in the studio this time I also used a Fender Blues Junior and a Cornell Plexi together. So I do sort of mix and match to take advantage of the different characteristics that each amp has. But for live playing these days I mostly use Marshalls.

Do you stick with the older Marshalls or do you use the newer ones?
I’ve got two different setups. In England I use JCM 900s, and in America I use some JCM 800s that I’ve kept over there for a long time. I usually use two heads and two 4x12 cabinets, and I crank one of them and run the other more quietly. Doing that gives me an extra little bit of spread while allowing me to keep my volume down.

I recently downloaded Bridge of Sighs from iTunes, and it came with set of photos, one of which showed you playing through a Hiwatt stack.
I used Hiwatts in Procol Harum, and maybe very early on with my own group I might have used them. But I don’t think so. I think right from the jump where I formed my three piece, I was using Marshall. It may be that we just had some borrowed gear for that photo, but I did like the Hiwatt a lot when I was with Procol. I used to get a very good tone out of it—much cleaner and very musical sounding.

Part of your sound is derived from distortion pedals, right?
Yes. For this album I used a Fulltone Full-Drive 2, but for live playing I’m using the Fulltone OCD because it has a lot more grunt to it. I don’t think there’s any sound on this album, or when I play live, that isn’t actually going through a pedal. I tend to use my guitar’s volume control for character and tone changes, so when I want a cleaner sound I just turn down.

What is on your pedalboard these days?
A Fulltone Deja Vibe, which is Fulltone’s version of the Uni-Vibe, a [Fulltone] Clyde 2 wah-wah and the OCD. I don’t use any echo. It’s more about ending up with something that sounds like the guitar. I don’t want to get too far away from the actual acoustic sound of the guitar. What makes the Strat such a great instrument is its musical sound, and if you start to chip away at that you can lose too much of its musicality.

What is your effects order?
The Deja Vibe is first in line, then the wah, and the OCD distortion pedal last. You want to think of the distortion unit as a kind of preamp, so to do that job it has to come after the other effects. Actually it was Michael Fuller [of Fulltone Effects] who got me into running the Deja Vibe into the distortion pedal. And he was right, that is the way to do it. But you’ve also got to get the levels right on each pedal to make it all balance out.

Did you have your effects configured differently in the Bridge of Sighs era?
I’m pretty sure I had the distortion pedal running into the Uni-Vibe then. But that original Uni-Vibe was a really different sounding pedal too. The Deja Vibe is close to it, but the Uni-Vibe had something different about it that seemed to work for me when I ran the distortion pedal into it.

What kind of distortion box were you using back then?
It was a homemade thing that an electronics guy built for me, and I think it was more of a volume boost than an actual distortion unit. I was driving the amps rather hard to get all that distortion. On my first album I was messing about with a Fuzz Face, but mainly I would just crank the amps in those days. With those late ’60s and early ’70s Marshalls you could just get a lovely distortion without having to use a distortion pedal. At one point I was also using an Ibanez Tube Screamer, but really, for 15 years or more now I haven’t been using anything but the Fulltone stuff. 

Your amplification setup was larger in those days too, right?
Yes. In the studio I was using what I use live now—two Marshall heads and two 4x12s—and for live playing back then I was using three full stacks. And that’s why my hearing is not as good today as it should be.

You went through a period when you disabled the vibrato in your Strats.
I did that many years ago when I was having trouble staying in tune, but when they came out with locking tuners that’s really what saved my bacon and enabled me to keep the whammy bar going. I don’t use it a lot, but it’s definitely part of the armory, as it were. It’s a subtle effect for me, but I couldn’t do without it. I think the springs and the gap behind the trem block all contribute to the sound of the Strat, and I also think you can hear a difference with the spring cover plate removed.

You’ve said before that you like a high action and heavy strings. Is that still the case?
I use a high action on the top two strings, and I use heavy strings—a .012 and a .015—for the top two as well. I can’t get the tone out of my guitar unless the strings are fairly heavy, and I also tune down a whole step. By tuning down I can use heavier strings on the top two and still be able to bend, and I also get a deeper tone.

It has been reported that you mainly use the middle pickup on your Strat.
I do use the middle pickup, but I’ve been using more of the neck pickup ever since I’ve had my Signature Fender Strats, which have three different eras of pickups on them—a ’50s reissue in the neck, a ’60s reissue in the middle, and a Texas Special at the bridge. The sweetness and the cleanness of the neck pickup enables me to get more of a lead sound out of it—it has plenty of highs in other words. So I’ve been using that pickup a lot more since Fender built that guitar for me, and they’re the only Strats I use now.

Did you intentionally pare down the Uni-Vibe sound on this album?
Yes, I think I only used it on one or two songs. I wanted to minimize the Uni-Vibe sound this time because I didn’t want this record to be too Robin Trower sounding. To be honest, I wanted it to be more about Jack than me. I wanted the album to sound different than what I’ve done previously. On the songs I did use it on, though, I ran it through just one of the amplifiers in order to create a bit of a stereo effect.

Do you recall how you originally discovered the Uni-Vibe?
Yeah, I do. I was in Manny’s Music in New York, and I was just trying out pedals to see what they had that was new. And that’s how I came across it. I was with Procol Harum at the time, and I remember liking it so much I used it that same night. I then used it on the next Procol album, which was Broken Barricades.

On “Day of the Eagle” from Bridge of Sighs, did you use a Uni-Vibe or something else to get that chorusing effect?
I used a Uni-Vibe on the song “Bridge of Sighs,” but the effect on “Day of the Eagle” I’m pretty sure was ADT [Automatic Double Tracking] tape echo. It’s an old-fashioned thing that they used to do with George Harrison’s guitar. Geoff Emerick [who engineered such Beatles’ albums as Revolver, The Beatles, Sgt. Peppers, and Abbey Road] showed it to me, and I liked it and used it on some of the stuff on Bridge of Sighs. I can remember them using a Revox tape machine, and Geoff would speed it up and slow it down by running the tape around a pencil—it was a very old-fashioned way of doing things, but it was a great effect. That technique, as well as the Uni-Vibe, added a spaciousness to the guitar sound that I don’t think we’d heard so much of earlier. Also, when Geoff recorded my guitar in the studio he had three mics at different distances from the speakers. And that’s how he got that sort of huge sound. He might have been the first to record a guitar like that—with a mic up close, another at a middle distance, and one further away. I remember him listening to us playing in the studio and just walking about using his ears to determine where it sounded best—and that’s where he put the mics.

Did you feel that the sound you had in mind was appreciably different than that of the other rock guitarists at the time?
I was going for an ethereal kind of thing that maybe other guitar players weren’t doing so much. It’s all about creating a sense of spaciousness, and the way I did it was by playing quite loud but not hitting the strings very hard at all. That’s how you maintain the sweetness in your tone but also keep that sustaining thing going.

You left Procol Harum and immediately had a sound that was uniquely your own. How do you think that happened?
It was just the music I started to create. I know it sounds very simple, but it comes from the compositional side of things rather than the player side. I’ve always felt that composing music for the guitar has been my strength, and what has enabled me to keep going and still be around today is that I’m able to keep coming up with stuff. I’ve been very lucky, really.