Originally published in Prog magazine (UK) 105 · December 2019
My Record Collection: Jonathan Peters (excerpt)
Interview1 min read
All big numbers and budgets by day, the CFO of restaurant empire The Ivy spends his free time drifting away to Close To The Edge, getting misty-eyed at Marillion and genuinely asking if Supper’s Ready.
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“I stuck with all the oldie favourites for years and years. Then I took a job in Italy, and while sat in my office, bored and missing record shops, I found Amazon online. Amazon would send me things from the UK, and I’d see reviews that would switch me on to new things, or what other customers were buying. I started spreading the net, and found bands like Dream Theater. Over a very short period of time I bought a stupid amount of CDs by people such as Transatlantic, Liquid Tension Experiment, all of the Dream Theater offshoots, and taking other chances. The name Beardfish came up, and they were supporting Flying Colors for the first album. I’d never heard of them, so I looked into their back catalogue. I bought everything, and started absolutely loving their stuff, especially The Void. To suddenly see young energy in a prog band again was brilliant. And then I saw pretty much all of these bands at Progressive Nation At Sea [alludes to the T-shirt from the festival].