Back To The Future

In 2021, Magenta’s Rob Reed relaunched his old band, Cyan, with a new line-up and a polished reimagining of For King And Country. They’ve now teamed up again to tackle Pictures From The Other Side. Reed and vocalist Peter Jones tell Prog about bringing a new lease of life to old material and why there’s more to come.

“I knew the songs were good back in the day,” Cyan mainman Rob Reed says of his band’s original releases, from back in the 1990s. “But they just needed to be reworked. A lot

of people would go back and remix the album or tinker with it, but this is a major rebuilding, throwing out sections and writing new ones. Some of the tracks are unrecognisable, some less so. I just enjoy fixing things, and hearing them with the full production.”

Reed is speaking down the phone from his studio in Wales on the cusp of Cyan’s latest release, a reworking of their 1994 album Pictures From The Other Side. The premise is fairly simple: with a new line-up, let’s rearrange, reimagine and rework the album, and record it on much better gear.

Reed and co already gave Cyan’s 1993 debut, For King And Country, a 21st-century makeover a few years ago, and they’ve decided it’s now time to have a bash at their follow-up record. It smacks of a job-well-done, with the album’s evolution fascinating to see. After three records in the 90s, the multiinstrumentalist stopped Cyan and locked it away in the filing cabinet while reaching to the stars with his ongoing project, Magenta.

“I’ve always loved the tracks I wrote for the Cyan albums,” Reed says now. “I’ve always sort of thought, ‘What would they sound like with all the modern production?’ The studio I’ve got now is out of this world. And it’s also to solve the mistakes in the composition as well. I listen back to stuff and think, ‘Oh God, I wish I had written it like this.’”