Guy Babylon

Sometimes you find an artist (Guy Babylon in this case) who you just wish would release more music as you know they are so capable of producing great stuff. Keyboard Magazine in the late eighties used to run readers songs competitions. If you were an unsigned artist you could submit a song or tune to the competition. They would release the winning track on ‘fexi-disc’ (gasp!) which, to be fair, was fairly adventurous at the time as it still cost a lot of cash to produce music on proper vinyl etc or CD, which at that time as only a few years old. Kudos to Keyboard Magazine for trying. (it was good mag in those days – now it is a small pile off …erm…advertising.)

The winner of the competition was a bloke called Guy Babylon with a track called Babylon Bleu.

The track was an awesome demonstration of a progressive instrumental track. With some very adventurous sounds (for that time) and some great playing Babylon, in less than 3 minutes, takes you through a range of musical motifs sounding like a true 5 member prog band.

You can hear the track on a download at KVR Audio Forums along with most of the other Keyboard Mag flexi disc release – some great stuff there!

With organs, sampled voices and an excellent synth/sampled guitar (expertly played) Babylon shows how to really rock on keyboards. The track has great riffs, great programming, super funky piano and organ and very neat playing – especially the Jan Hammer like pseudo-guitar. A truly awesome piece of music. I wish I could get a modern digitally produced and mastered version of it. Guy, my cash is waiting!

The irony is that is the only piece of music I could ever find from Guy Babylon despite years of searching. He has been part of the Elton John gigging band for many years but doesn’t seem to release any of his own music. A real shame since (in my opinion) we really lack keyboard playing standard bearers.
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He does have his own fab website at www.guybabylonfan.net website but is mostly dedicated to touring with Elton John and other session stuff he has done. C’mon Guy write a few solo albums and let us hear what you can really do with today with modern recording technology.