In Rome by Raimondo Luciani

Classical Miller

Many people know Dominic Miller as the guitarist in Sting's band but probably few have heard of his classical guitar beginnings.

Dominic Miller: I started playing guitar when I was about eleven or twelve, My sister taught me how to play some bossa nova tunes. I was brought up in Argentina, and in the 60s there was a bossa nova revolution. I was a kid in those days, so I was lured into that style before I did anything else.

What sort of records did you have at that time?

I had Baden Powell, the Jobim classics, Toquinho, and Vinicius de Moraes. I used to play those records to death, and of course some more pop Brazilian music, Gilberto Gil when he was really young, and the Beatles and the Stones.

When you really first began playing, were you just on a classical style guitar?

Oh yes, a Spanish guitar. My father played guitar, he was always playing tangos at home. I was always playing fingerstyle. With bossa nova the bass is always moving and the chords are moving in a different rhythm to the bass, so I was playing quite dexterous right-hand stuff. I went from playing for a half an hour a day to two or three hours. Then at the age of twelve we moved to America, to Wisconsin, because my dad had a job there. I carried on playing this South American stuff, but then at 14 or 15 we moved back to England. I was going through a little rock phase, wanting to emulate Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix, but then I started listening to Segovia playing Bach and Spanish music. I thought it was really amazing, and I felt driven to learn it. So my dad got me a classical guitar teacher, David Bisset, who said I should do grade 5 guitar. I had no idea what that meant, but I learned three Grade 5 pieces and I really, really liked it.

I got through the exam very well and then I did Grade 6 a few months later. I did a Villa-Lobos Prelude No. l, and I did a Poulenc Sarabande, quite simple, but with great chords; I loved the harmony. When I was 16, I met Felicia Galletta a composer and a piano teacher who was at the Royal Academy. She couldn't play guitar but she became my music teacher, so I got into composing pieces in the same mode as the ones I was learning. I could hear, of course the Brazilian influence of Villa-Lobos, and I tried to play some of those tunes in a more bossa nova style just because I was young and wanted to change the world. In the second section of Villa-Lobos Prelude No.3, I used to play with a samba rhythm, and it sounded fantastic. She taught me how composers like Poulenc and Dowland structured the music, so then I took music theory Grades 5, 6, 7 and then Grade 8. I was interested in the mathematics of music and the way it worked. She took me through Grade 8 guitar, but being a non-guitarist, she was teaching me how to play as a musician. I did Grade 8 because I had to get it to go to the Guildhall.

We moved back to the States when I was 16 or 17, and I found a guitar teacher there, an Armenian guy called James Yogouriyan. I was two years away from going to the Guildhall but I kept my chops up learning Bach. I said I just want to learn Bach. I was interested in the music more, the key changes and the harmony. That's when I got the Bach bug, which I've had ever since. Just before I went to Guildhall I got a top-up from Hector Quine. He was great. I was very serious, but I wasn't very good, that was the problem. So I went to him for about eight sessions over a two-month period.

Were you playing with nails?

I was playing with nails, but actually I prefer the sound of flesh now. Flesh can sound naily; it gives a much better tone for me when I play nylon, which is my main acoustic sound. So then I started at Guildhall, which is where the classical guitar thing all fell apart. I thought it was very stuffy. My composition teacher at Guildhall was Buxton Orr, who was a great teacher; he was hands-on helping me to develop my own style, which is a mixture of different influences: the Bach, the bossa nova, Hendrix, and Spanish music. But I was at a cross roads, so when I had been at Guildhall for about a year I left, because I started getting work playing in bars. I started playing bossa novas and to sing a bit. I wanted to be a Professional and to make some money. I did it for three or four nights a week and I had cash in my pocket.

I went to see John McLaughlin, Paco de Lucia and Al di Meola in the Albert Hall around that time and so I started doing more things like that, more jazzy, kind of fun, exciting music, and flamenco. I listened to Chick Corea and Weather Report, and I really got into improvising. I was in a duo with Dylan Fowler and that was going well, but I wanted to learn about other music, so I started playing electric in bands.

Was it hard to switch?

Not at all, because I wanted to get into that rock world. I used a pick and fingers. I was listening to a lot of Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix and I thought rock guitar looked like a much more interesting job. The first band I joined was World Party in 1987. They had a minor hit in America, so suddenly I was in a bus touring America and Europe. I developed a style as an electric guitar player. But the reason I got the job in the first place is because basically I could play anything they wanted me to play. That is something I would say to any young guitarist: you’ve got to broaden your mind musically by listening to other styles. You owe it to yourself as a musician to really listen to music and to really study music. I’m still studying now. I was fortunate because technically I could play anything, which is thank you to my classical background, and to all these great teachers I had. Then I joined a really heavy rock band called King Swamp and got into that whole heavy rock thing. My hair was long and I wore tight trousers and cowboy boots.

What was it like being on stage with all that kit on?

It was such fun, and to be a guitarist in a band is a major role. So, I was finally living the dream. I became known as the top of the B list session players. I was doing sessions with lots of different bands, playing electric mainly, but then I thought, why don’t I utilize this new style of playing jazzier, more improvisational rock, but do it on a nylon string guitar? It wasn’t really something that had been done at all in the studio - electric guitar with a Spanish style or vice versa. So I started playing nylon string a lot around 1988, and I became known for doing that. The first album I did with Julia Fordham Porcelain was a good album for me because people heard what I could do on a nylon guitar. The big transition was when her producer Hugh Padgham got me involved in Phil Collins’s album, where I played the biggest hit he’s ever had: Another Day in Paradise on a nylon string guitar. That was it really, that was the end of the struggle. I was working all the time after that.

You’ve been with Sting’s band for 13 years now. What is it like? Do you all work intensely together?

We don’t work intensely together but I go down there, either to his place in Italy or in Wiltshire and we get together and I help him out with arrangements. Sometimes I get my songs on his albums, which is great. It’s a good working relationship we have. I am like a sparring partner. He’s the older brother with the success and the fame and I'm the younger brother with some some stuff for him, mainly harmonic ideas, which he is interested in, not really guitar playing. We're the same. We don't care about the Instrument.

You mean it's more the harmonic progressions, which you are exploring?

Yeah, he loves quirky changes and I've learned so much by working with him and I'd like to think he's learned something from working with me.

I have just got into playing Bach again in the last two years. At the beginning of the last tour with Sting, which lasted two years, I got so bored and Sting gave me the Bach violin Partitas. I had been working on some other Bach pieces which I was hiding in my guitar case. I became obsessed with it again, probably playing Bach for three or four hours a day; before I would go on stage to play with Sting, I would be playing Bach in the dressing room and in the hotel room. 

Is it your fault that Sting plays Bach every morning then?

I'll tell you how the bug started really; it was when we were doing one of the albums. Sometimes there's a lot of waiting around, so I learned Lauro's piece El Marabino and Sting saw me learning it. My reading is appalling but I worked it out. 

Is your reading really appalling?

Yes, absolutely; but I can work it out, and my memory is very good. So I learned that piece and then Sting tried to learn it. Then it became a sort of race. I learned a Bach piece and Sting thought that was really good, so then he learned some Bach that I didn't know and it became a bit of a competition to see who had the best tunes. He does it every morning. I do it for hours. I've just recorded one tune on its own for my next album: the first movement of the Bach Partita. It's all such good stuff, but I don't want to play it in the Wigmore Hall. I'd rather play Bach in a club like where we are now, in Pizza Express, and get the punters to listen to it that way, with clanging glasses. 

© Classical Guitar magazine | November 2002

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