Journey to the Centre of the Eye
ARTIST: Nektar
RELEASE: 1971
INTERVIEWEE: Derek "Mo" Moore
It's the late 1960s. A bunch of British musicians move to West Germany, form a band and start making space-rock albums. Those records are released in Germany, and eventually outside that country, but not in the United States. This set of circumstances helps explain why Journey to the Centre of the Eye, a concept album and debut release from Nektar, is hardly known in the States. But the album deserves notice and appreciation, and it merits recognition as one of the era's more creatively successful conceptually-oriented albums.
Debuting with a concept album wasn't a tried-and-true strategy for a band trying to build a following, but Derek Moore says that it just seemed natural for Nektar. "The music sort of flowed," he says. "And then we made it tell a story; it just felt good as a space opera."