The Hecate's Dreams front man who leant his skill and style to "Creavolution" in the shape of some very excellent lead guitar solos. We shall be waxing lyrical about his great journey from hairy rock god to becoming the slightly less hairy Professor Page, Dean of The Carnegie School Of Education at Leeds Beckett University. Rock goes to college indeed, where he will be joining us in a few minutes...

Magic Moments At Twilight Time And many greetings, Professor Page! Seems very strange calling you that, but almost disrespectful not to! So how do we find you on this balmy summer eve?
Damien Page Really well, thanks Mick - enjoying the memories...
Magic Moments At Twilight Time Excellent. I do hope I'm not setting you up for a severe ribbing from your students when you start back next month, do they know about your rock and roll past?
Damien Page Nah, it's a well kept secret. Moving to the north helped with that!
Magic Moments At Twilight Time So none of them know you have a Facebook profile then? Snigger! Well, if I were you, I wouldn't be keeping it so secret, you should be proud of some of the work you did. Now where to start? You'd have first got in touch with M&E in 1993 some time, offering a couple of tracks for one of our Guilfin Benefit Tape series, sound about right?
Damien Page Man, 1993... yes, that sound familiar. can't remember how I heard about M&E though. must have been a music mag
Magic Moments At Twilight Time We were getting a lot of coverage back then, yeah, obviously not our local news network as you were based in Kent at the time. Yeah, I've got it here, the 3rd Guilfin Benefit Tape has two Hecate's Dreams tracks on, "Enjoy The View" and "Sweet Hecate's Dreams". Let's sit back, put our feet up and have a listen to the first of those, then perhaps we can have a chat about the band. This is "Enjoy The View", er, enjoy the view muchly...

Magic Moments At Twilight Time And here's Hecate's Dreams, Professor Page on the right there...

Damien Page Ahhhh the glory days! Tried to look suitably rock-star-moody
Magic Moments At Twilight Time And succeeded greatly, sir! When was the last time you heard this stuff?
Damien Page must be 15 years at least. the band formed when we were 16 and then the first tape when we were 18-19
Magic Moments At Twilight Time I love the guitar style, it's just so utterly busy. I think I described HD as "The Stray Cats meet The Cardiacs" in a review, what was your own take on your musical stylings?
Damien Page Busy is probably the best word. I wanted to be Steve Vai when I was kid. But then I realised that would take far too many hours playing scales. After that I listened to a lot of different styles and they just blended. I liked folk, blues. Still had a thrash hangover so bit of that as well
Magic Moments At Twilight Time It was a wonderful mix of styles, certainly. We released your debut album, "Rape Of The Fly" (M&E 256) in the spring of 1994, seem to recall it peaked at no.3 in our chart, which is no mean feat. And when I was looking for someone to add some leadwork to "Creavolution", it was this track from it that really caught my attention, "Sweet Hecate's Dreams"...

Magic Moments At Twilight Time I've digitised the whole tape, which I'll be making available as a free download at the end of this interview. Sadly, there were a few minor examples of the potential flaws of cassettes on the four tracks of side A, but B came out perfect, as you can hear...
Magic Moments At Twilight Time Here's the cover, memories?
Magic Moments At Twilight Time Worth adding that if you have a copy of the cassette yourself, I'd be happy to re-digitise side A from it if you like?
Damien Page That track is still one my favourites. Listening back I can hear the prog influence more than I noticed at the time. I was also a big Yes fan. The early stuff, not the terrible spandex era... Steve Howe is an awesome guitarist and I tried to channel him a bit. Most who heard it said it was too long...
Magic Moments At Twilight Time Nah, that's just pop mentality, isn't it? Everything needs to be 3 minutes. I love this track, it's an epic. Must say, I wouldn't have thought Yes, it really does have a strong offbeat rockabilly feel to it...