Although the ‘Once And Future King’ project has finally borne fruit in a post Avantasia world, the genesis of it all goes back much further. "Like the majority of British people, I was always curious about our heritage," Gary admits. "It was something I was really into as a teenager, and this is just something that has been spurred on from there. But it’s just been one of those things … and I think what really impresses me is that so much of the story is so open to interpretation. After all it’s a legend, and within certain time parameters obviously, no one can turn around and say that one point of view is right or wrong, it’s just down to personal belief. And really, when you look at all the old documentation from over the centuries, you can kind of glean certain things from all of those sources, but there are so many grey areas between the main points of the story, that it really is just open to individual interpretation … so that’s what I really enjoyed about it. And at the same time, I though if I was gonna do something like this on a grand concept scale, it was an area that I was never likely to revisit. You know, when you’ve done it, you’ve kind of been there and bought the T-shirt, so I thought ‘let’s put that extra bit of time and effort into getting it as close to perfect as I can from my humble musician’s standpoint’. So really I guess you could say that, in many respects, it’s been more a labour of love than anything else. It’s been hugely expensive to do, but at the end of the day, if you don’t do things that inspire you, or you don’t do things that try and take it that one stage further, then you don’t really progress any."

In the planning stages for a good few years now, it’s only these past twelve months or so that the project has finally come to a conclusion. "Yeah, really since the end of the last Ten record," nods Gary, "I think that by then it had progressed to the stage where it was ready. Before then, I’d had snippets of ideas for certain parts, but it got to the stage where I thought it was turning into a bit of a monster, ha, ha! I had so much material on it that I thought ‘Now is the time to do it’. It was getting to the stage where it was either going to become a massive white elephant that never got completed, or I was going to have to knuckle down and finish it. And after the touring we did on the back of the last Ten record I thought that maybe we’d bought ourselves a bit of time between the eighteen monthly Ten records, so now was the time for a concerted effort on ‘Once And Future King’. So as I said, I had most of the ideas laid out then, and I’d even begun to approach singers, you know, I had a rough idea who my cast was gonna be. Everything just seemed to come together simultaneously."

"In the same way," Gary continues, "I tried wherever possible, to go for different sounding textural voices for the different characters. I tried to make it so that no two characters sounded alike, basically because with so much information circulating round, the last thing I wanted was for people to have to have the booklet in front of them to know when a different character was entering … so it was important that they were all different as well. And then it really did begin to take shape, although I didn’t start to slot the musical ideas in until I had made up my mind where the pivotal points of the story were, and which character, Lancelot for example, would be singing. Then I looked down the entire roster and I thought ‘Well, Lancelot needs to speak here and here …’. And sticking with the Lancelot character as a case in point, I thought ‘this character needs to be a little more melodic than hard’. So I thought about Danny Vaughn, and I thought that was gonna be quiet commercial …commercial voice, commercial overtones, so I’ll put two commercial songs in for Lancelot. And then after that the ideas, the musical ideas … they kind of picked themselves for the characters really."

Sort of a Catch 22 situation? "Exactly, "laughs Gary, "I just arrived one day with the whole thing on paper. And then the main problem was literally trying to get everything down to two albums, because although it might seem to be a massive amount of time, it’s not really when you’re dealing with something as extensive as the Arthurian legends. I suppose it’s a bit like trying to deal with something like ‘The Iliad’ or ‘The Odyssey’ inside two albums – very, very difficult. So there was a lot of shaving away to be done, and then it was just a matter of trying to piece it together with some narrative in between. Originally I was gonna have some narration between each of the songs, but basically I ran out of time. I managed to get all the singers slotted in around their schedules, and get all the material back from them, but this was the only thing I ran out of time on. And in a way I suppose it’s nice, because I now have the full, unabridged version of the text in the booklet, whereas if I’d gone for a narrative between songs, I’d really have had to slice it down quite considerably to just a couple of lines … otherwise you might be waiting six or seven minutes before the first song starts, ha, ha!"

With a mammoth 22 tracks across the two albums, it comes as quite a shock to learn just how many songs were in the frame originally. "There was quite a lot of material that didn’t get used," says Gary. "There are ten songs on the first part, and twelve on the second, and the whole thing was honed down from just short of 50 songs. So there’s a hell of a lot of unused stuff because I was just chamfering it down all the time. I mean, stuff gets used anyway you know, I’ll end up using quite a lot of it on different projects in the future no doubt. But really, I left some of the stuff out, not because they weren’t strong songs, but just because I had similar sounding songs on the concept already. Some of them unfortunately got left out, not because of their own strengths, but because of their similarity to something else."

How difficult was it I wondered, fitting a singer to a particular character? "Well, at the end of the day," Gary ponders, "I think what I ended up doing was just thinking about the characters, and what type of characters I imagined they’d be. I mean, Morgana, you imagine her being quite rough, quite gruff voiced, you know, quite a witch … she’s a sorceress, she’s an evil woman, so you want her to sound that way. Similarly with Guinevere, you want her to sound sweet and very mellow … and again, I wanted the three female characters, as with all the male characters, to sound totally different to each other. I guess the surprise choice at the end was Sabine Edelsbacher (Edenbridge) who plays Nimue on the second album, because her voice is so totally operatic, and a little bit ‘out there’ … I’m waiting for people’s reaction on that because it is so totally different, but again, totally in contrast to Morgana and Guinevere."

Certainly anyone who hasn’t heard Sabine with Edenbridge is likely to be in for a bit of a surprise. "Yeah," agrees Gary, "but I think it’s a refreshing change, and for something like ‘Once And Future King’, it’s just what was needed, something with that little bit of difference. But similarly you know, in the male voices there's also quiet a lot of difference. I mean it’s very hard to compare characters like … or the voice textures, of like Danny Vaughn with Bob Catley for instance, or with DC Cooper, or Dougie White. Everyone comes from a different part of the rock spectrum, and everyone is equally strong at what he or she does within that, but the amazing thing is that it’s all come together quiet nicely to sit within the overall concept. Irene Jansen for instance, relatively unknown – she’s done little bits of backing vocals and stuff with Arjen Lucassen before now, but never anything in the forefront. And of course, I heard her voice and it was like ‘This girl’s got to be on it!’. It was always a desire of mine, in among the name artists, to try– in a concept like this anyway – to try and bring out something, or somebody new to the fore. And you know, on ‘Shapeshifter’ she’s done a fantastic job, it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing it better. So there were little bits of the concept like that which I personally felt were successes, little bits of achievements which, from my point of view, I felt really worked."

Leaving aside the various individual vocal performances for a second, the instrumentalists involved also deserve some recognition for their labours. "Well, basically it’s a core of Ten," offers Gary, "with Arjen Lucassen added, and Graham Woodcock, the keyboard player from The Quest. And obviously, with something as sprawling as this, it was important to me to have it done quickly and efficiently, and when you’ve worked with guys for the best part of ten years, you know you’re gonna get it done quickly. It was also equally important from my perspective, that people got to hear Chris on something other than a Ten record first time out. I mean obviously, he shines all over this record, and when we do another Ten album later this year, I don’t think there’ll be the same scrutiny or the same one on one comparison with Vinny, that there would have been had the first thing anybody had heard of Chris Francis was the next Ten record. This is to ease people in gently if you like to his variety of styles, and it’s hard to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses when everything is so strong … so yeah I’m very pleased, and I think he’s quite pleased with the way it’s turned out guitar wise."

"And leading on from that," Gary adds, "there’s little ways that we’re developing things within Ten as well. I mean, John Haliwell did all the six and twelve string acoustics, and some of them sound fantastic on songs like ‘Shapeshifter’, ‘King For a Day’ … if you’ll excuse the pun, it’s added another string to his bow! And everybody seems to have started respecting everyone else’s departments now, and that makes it a lot easier .. it’s almost effortless now. That side of things, the music, was almost effortless, and really the only problem was scheduling everybody else. When you do something like that with ten different singers, the scheduling is a nightmare. Some people could come and sing, some couldn’t; some could sing but they had to do it now, and they had to do it in their own country because they couldn’t afford the time to fly over. So I was mailing tapes to some people, slotting some people in, I was doing some stuff here … trying to be as omnipresent as possible, but when you’re only one person, you can’t be in two places at the same time."

To be marketed as two separate albums, at the time of writing, the release schedule for ‘Once And Future King’ is for Part 1 to be released on August 25^th with Part 2 to follow on October 6th. As Gary reasoned, "It should give people a chance to hopefully get hooked on the first one, and then be awaiting the second one … and also not too long a gap that the fire goes out of it you know, because it doesn’t really end … it’s very much up in the air at the end of the first record. And there are some fantastic performances on the second album, people like Harry Hess, DC Cooper, Sean Harris … there’s some really great stuff on there."

Talking of Sean Harris, his performances is definitely one which evokes strong memories of classic Diamond Head. "I think the thing is," muses Gary, "he’s taken a little bit of a hammering in recent years, and I know that things are changing all the time with Diamond Head. I mean, there may be another Diamond Head album, there may not be, I don’t know which way Sean’s going on that with Brian. But you know, I was really keen to – I remember the glory days if you like – and if somebody’s got it, they’ve always got it, unless of course something major has happened, and he really did pull out all the stops for me. A totally nice guy, very easy to work with … just sang until we had everything we needed, no complaints, just straight in and done."

Musically speaking, whilst there’s obviously a common bond, the two albums are actually quite distinct, the second being musically much more stretching than the first. "Yeah, I think it’s definitely stretching in a lot of ways," agrees Gary. "I think the first one is, more expected if you like - the power songs are powerful and commercial, and the ballads are nice. The way I look at it is, the first one is more of a straightforward rock album, whereas the second one is really more thought provoking, more progressive even. And again, the styles of the singers on the second one as well – there’s a lot of different stuff on there. You’ve got DC Cooper opening in typically powerful fashion, there’s the operatic thing with Sabine, there’s an instrumental on there with a choral part … but again finishing off with the song that Harry sings, the final ‘Once And Future King’ song with a massive instrumental at the end of it, very grandiose stuff. Even down to the track I do (‘I Still Love You’), that’s got a real sort of Jellyfish flavour to it … so there’s a whole cross section of things in there."

Whilst ‘Once And Future King’ is made for the stage, or even cinema, the practicalities of putting on a full blown show begs the questions of whether it’s likely to happen. "Well, I’d like to think so," offers Gary, "but the only thing that could prevent it being put on for, say, a five day theatre run, or a three day Gods type run, would be the cost … that’s the only thing that would prevent something like that happening. And you know, it would have to be … it even raises the question of whether we’d get the original cast all together schedule wise at the same time. But I dare say, even if you had to lose one or two singers, to get the bulk of the original cast together, then it would be worth doing – but it’s just purely down to cost. I mean, obviously, if somebody was prepared to film it and make a DVD, then there's a good chance that the actual money would be accrued, but it would have to be thought out very carefully I think. I’m certainly not ruling it out though, I mean … eventually I would quite like to see it performed on stage, but in the current climate it’s quite hard to even contemplate something like that when it would be so costly to put on."

‘Must’ve given you a taste for it though’, I proffered. "Well yeah it has, if you can break into that sort of arena," Gary ponders. "Even film scoring, I’ve had a couple of companies approach me about film scores for later in the year, so it might be that I do something like that. Again, something that would stretch me, something that would be a challenge … I like to think that there's no point being in this business unless you’re gonna try and better yourself, so I’ll have a look at these offers and see what they do. Obviously, the most paramount thing will be the next Ten record, but it definitely gets me thinking. If somebody suggested a concept of this nature … when I finally finished it, it had taken so long that I said ‘Somebody punch me if I suggest something like this again’, but let’s face it, if it sells a hundred thousand copies, you’ve got to do another, you’d be stupid not to. You’ve got to keep your options open … never say never, ha, ha!"