By Martin Popoff
Any interesting surprises for the festival live set?
"Well, we're negotiating with a couple of previous members of Asia who shall remain nameless. But I think there will be certainly one previous member to come join us to augment the line-up, so that will make a nice change for people to see, a former member of the band. It won't be John Wetton, but I've worked with him a fair bit lately, and did a convention with him last month, and wrote a song with him for his next solo album. But I think the days of him being with Asia are pretty well over. He's going to work on his solo stuff; it won't be John. Another interesting thing is that we've been working on a pretty long set for the last year or so and I think it's a question of refining and presenting it in its full entirety. We very rarely actually get a chance to perform the whole set. Because when you're doing festivals or you know, the package tour situation, you're cut to quite a small amount of time. So from our standpoint, it's nice that we're able to do the full set in its entirety."
Finally, I asked Geoff how he views the various "phases" the band has gone through since that monstrous multi-platinum debut back in '82. "Obviously, I've been a fixture throughout, so it's hard to be objective," reflects Geoff. "But we've definitely gone through some periods. The range of the music has been quite wide from a pop influence to a jazz influence to heavy rock to progressive music. As I see it, rightly or wrongly, we've managed to explore quite a few musical avenues. And I think that, in many ways, is what makes the band what is today, that we are capable of doing that."