Author: Adam

I’m going to write this down while I still remember it. 

I’d like to apologise in advance to anyone who’s feelings I hurt, or who feels left out – or who wishes they’d been left out. 

Also, of course, for stating my opinions as facts. 

Also very grateful to have my facts corrected by anyone who remembers things better than I do. 

Like a lot of rock’n’roll stories this one begins in the Summer of 1976. I had just turned 16 and had a Saturday job handing out flyers for a shopping mall named the Antique Hypermarket on Kensington High Street. I had to bicycle there for 10am on a Saturday morning, fill my shoulder bag with flyers, cycle to the top of Portobello Road and hand them out to the milling throngs of tourists until the flyers had all gone. It only paid £2 an hour but it was great for people watching. The first time I saw Punks they looked like they had arrived from another planet. At that time, most people dressed like members of Abba or Stevie Nicks’s Fleetwood Mac. When I finished handing out the flyers I would wander down Portobello Road to the poorer end and check out all the record stalls. I was totally obsessed with music, as always. At the time I was going through a Led Zeppelin/ Queen/ Thin Lizzy phase. In those days, most boutiques had a record stall concession and the one in the basement of 253 Portobello Road particularly interested me because it sold bootlegs. The proprietor was a friendly soul who would let me listen to his wares even though he knew I usually couldn’t afford to buy anything. One Saturday I went downstairs to this stall to hear a highly spirited version of “Route 66”. I knew the song from the Rolling Stones first album but this was something else entirely. Fast and furious and enormously urgent. It was followed up by a short snappy tune with a killer guitar solo. I inspected the turntable. It was an EP – an Extended Player. A 7” 45 with two songs on each side. Even in 1976 this was an anachronism. EP’s had been popular in the 1950s and 60s, aimed at people who couldn’t afford the LP, but they had fallen into abeyance by the end of the 60s. I looked at the friendly bootleg vendor, he was smiling all over his face. He turned the record over. “Beautiful Delilah” – a song I knew from the first Kinks album, but again, this version kicked like a mule in comparison. “Teenage Letter” followed – absolute mayhem. Ferociously fast, with a guitar solo to compare with Dave Davies at his most berserk. The friendly vendor turned it over. And over again. I must have listened to it three times before I left. I made a mental note of the title: “Speedball” by The Count Bishops, before scurrying off to buy a cheap 2nd hand copy of “Aftermath” by The Rolling Stones. 

“Speedball” bugged me. It got under my skin. I wasn’t sure about it. It seemed like a dam about to break. Talking about it at school with my mates, it turned out that someone I knew who was a couple of years older had a half-brother who managed The Count Bishops! Pete Manheim. Blimey! For some reason that clinched it. The following week I went back to my bootleg vendor but my man had sold out of “Speedball”. So I went to Rough Trade on Kensington Park Road and picked up a copy there. I took it home and played it into the ground. Suddenly Queen and Led Zeppelin didn’t seem to have the same allure. At this point in my life I had just managed to inveigle myself into the school rock’n’roll band, Captain Comedown, by getting them a gig on condition that I got to play with them. This I did. The band were not unusual for the time in being primarily influenced by the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bad Company. I didn’t mind playing this stuff, as well as I could, which was not particularly well, but looking back I can see that “Speedball” marked a big change, not just for me but for British rock’n’roll in general. (Ironically, as I learned later, only one member of the Count Bishops was British). I listened to the way Johnny Guitar and Zenon de Fleur played and thought: I could do that. Actually I couldn’t – yet – but I thought I could, with practice, whereas I never for a moment thought I could play like Brian May or Jimmy Page. The difference is critical. I practiced. And practiced. I quit school in December 1977 so that I would have more time to devote to the task. I read up about The Count Bishops in the music press. Apparently at their gigs they liked to play the songs on the first two Rolling Stones albums, in correct sequence. This was the kind of monastic, obsessive attention to detail that I could relate to. I had the first Stones album, I obtained the second one and got stuck in, learning all the licks I could from them both. I still maintain that this is an excellent apprenticeship for learning to play rock’n’roll guitar. 

Then Punk arrived in all its tatty glory. Autumn/ Winter ’76, the whole of ’77. London was a very exciting place to be. I was very fortunate to be there. I was a little bit too young to get in to the gigs to begin with, but that got easier as I turned 17. I never actually adopted the Punk look. I didn’t particularly like it and I did not want to be a ‘Middle Class Poser’. It would be unseemly. But I certainly bought as many of the records as I could and went to as many gigs as I could. It was a great time for going to gigs. They could be free, or 50p to get in; 75p or £1 for a ‘name’ act. Two bands, sometimes three. Even if the bands were rubbish the chances are that they would be fun to watch (I’m thinking specifically of The Warsaw Pakt and Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds here). And of course, in the middle of all this, there were The Count Bishops. Gigging away, putting out singles and trying very hard to keep up with what they had, in some ways, started. It must have been tough for them to see all these twits in safety pins and spiky haircuts getting so much instant attention but they seemed to have found their niche on the rapidly changing London gig circuit. I used to go and see them every chance I got and I would position myself in front of Johnny Guitar and watch his fingers like a hawk. “Oh God, that kid’s in again”, he must have thought if he noticed me at all. The Count Bishops could never be a Punk band, no matter how many Punk bands they shared stages with. Their roots were solidly 60s UK R’n’B. But they had leather jackets and relatively short haircuts and AC-30 amps and they made fine, fierce music. In the eighteen months or so since “Speedball” had come out they had gone through some changes. Mike Spenser, their former singer and leader, had left the band. They had carried on as a four piece for awhile, putting out the marvellous single “Train Train”- written by rhythm guitarist Zenon de Fleur –  but had felt the need for a frontman. So they imported Dave Tice from Australia to be their new singer. Tice was much more of a traditional kind of Rock singer. He must have been amazed at the Punk goings on in London when he arrived, but he got on with the job and they put out an album in the Summer of 1977. Listening to it now, it’s got some nice tracks on it. It is a punk album in the original sense (hence the small P) but it seemed rather old-fashioned at the time. Nothing on it had the timeless urgency of “Speedball”. But I liked it. I felt a certain loyalty. I saw The Bishops (as they were always known) here, there and all over the place. They always put on a good show. I got chatty with Paul Balbi, their drummer, who seemed the friendliest. He was also Australian and had been instrumental in bringing Dave Tice over. Balbi lent me tapes of rehearsals and studio sessions. I mean, Wow… He trusted me with them. Just a really nice guy (and a very good drummer, his hi-hat splashes being a kind of signature). 

Meanwhile, Captain Comedown were getting a few gigs around town. We were never going to be a Punk band either but we sort of fit in by virtue of youth and inexperience. We were noisy, brash and full of ourselves. We got a gig at The Roxy, long after its prime, on a bill with two other bands, one of which was named Bodies and who were by far the most useless band I’ve ever seen. They were a three piece – two guitars and drums. One of the guitars was a home-made double neck. They wore white boiler suits. They could not play. I mean, they really could not play. The guitars were out of tune with themselves and each other. The drummer could not keep time. They attempted to play David Bowie’s “Suffragette City”. I have not forgotten them. We got up to do our set. The place was pretty much empty but a couple of bored looking blokes dressed as Punks hung around the front of the stage. One of them spat at me. He missed. I smiled at him. Possibly this was not the correct response. We got through it and, incredibly, the management offered us another date. We accepted gratefully. At no time did anyone mention money. But when it came to the date in question we arrived with all our gear to find the Roxy had closed. Shut up shop. Nobody home. Nobody had bothered to tell us. Being enterprising lads, we wandered down the street to the Rock Garden to see if maybe we could get a support slot there that night. “Fine by us if the headliners don’t mind”, we were told. And who were the headliners? Yep. The Count Bishops. So we got to meet them. I mentioned Pete Manheim. “You just lost the gig”, said Johnny Guitar. I nearly died on the spot. Fortunately he was joking. I renewed my chat with Paul Balbi. I asked him what had happened to Mike Spenser, the original singer. Balbi filled me in. Spenser had left under a bit of a cloud. There were no ill feelings but he was apparently not the easiest guy to work with. He had formed a band called The Cannibals and had put out an Indie 45 named “Good Guys” in a brown paper hand printed sleeve which he sold at his daily job at the Magic Bus company in Shaftesbury Avenue. Then The Cannibals had just left Mike holding nothing but the name and gone on to form a new band named The Inmates. And thus it was I heard the magic words: “he’s looking for a guitar player”. I immediately expressed interest. Paul grinned. “He’s got a heavy Brooklyn attitude”, he told me. I asked him if he would mention me to Mike, give me a number to call. He said he would. 

The very next day I headed down to the Magic Bus company in Shaftesbury Avenue. Magic Bus was one of those companies that regularly advertised in what remained of the Underground press. It was a leftover from hippie days. You could travel to Amsterdam or Paris by bus very cheaply. Also, overland to Morocco or even India. You get the idea. On this day, its office was very crowded. “Hope y’all broughtcha sleepin’ bags” I heard an unmistakable New York accent say. That was my first brush with Mike Spenser. I bought a copy of the “Good Guys” single off him but didn’t have the courage to mention wanting to play guitar for The Cannibals. I went home and played the record a lot. On the ‘B’ side was a slow R’n’B ballad named “Nothing Takes The Place Of You”. It was beautiful. So I left Captain Comedown and phoned the number on the 45 sleeve. On the phone, Mike was non-committal but not unfriendly. We arranged that I should turn up for an audition of sorts at the squat in Clapham where he was living. I brought with me two musician friends for moral support: David Catlin-Birch who went on to become a successful professional musician, and Graham Cronin who later transitioned to Gail Cronin and tragically died of cancer. (I later played with Graham in an early version of TreaTmenT.) At Mike Spenser’s front door in Silverthorne Road, Clapham, I was very nervous. We rang the bell and nothing happened. We rang again. After a couple of minutes Mike appeared with us at the front door. He must have come from a side entrance. He looked us up and down. Lambs to the slaughter. He suggested we convene in the pub up the road. So we did. Mike was smaller than I expected, about my height (I’m 5’8’’), curly black hair, dark piercing eyes. Completely undiluted Brooklyn accent. To us three, he presented a formidably exotic figure. Over a couple of pints, Mike explained that he had a drummer and two guitarists but needed a bass player. My heart sank. I was too late! But we talked music music music and I think Mike was impressed by my references. Turned out that one of his two guitarists was an older man who only wanted to play blues. While Mike enjoyed this purity it wasn’t entirely what he had in mind. So we had an audition in the basement of Silverthorne Road. I remember playing the licks to “Cry To Me” – the Solomon Burke ballad that The Rolling Stones had covered on their 3rd album “Out Of Our Heads” – and I could see that Mike enjoyed singing that. It turned out that Mike had left the Count Bishops in a huff over their refusal to put their recording of “Cry To Me” on the “Speedball” ep. It wouldn’t have fit, it wouldn’t have worked, it would have diluted the effect enormously. But Mike wasn’t having it. He wanted it on there and, actually, when he played me the acetate of it on his ancient stereogram, it sounded pretty damn good. If I’d been paying close attention, however, this tale might have sounded an alarm bell or two, but I wasn’t paying close attention. I was having a great time. I felt like I was passing an exam with flying colours. 

Mike gave me the skinny on The Count Bishops. The name came from a legendary New York street gang. Mike and fellow American Johnny Guitar had had a hardcore R’n’B band back in the States called Chrome. They were united in their love of the early Rolling Stones, Them, The Yardbirds The Animals – British R’n’B bands of the 60s. This was completely unfashionable at the time, on both sides of the pond but this just gave Mike and Johnny a deeper edge to their devotion. Then, for reasons unclear, Mike had de-camped to London. Wasting no time, he had found rhythm guitarist Zenon de Fleur (a Polish gentleman, real name Zenon Hierowski, the name de Fleur had emerged following a binge: “haw haw, lookat Zen on da floor”), English bassist Stevie Lewins and Australian drummer Paul Balbi. Thus assembled, Mike got on the phone to Johnny in New York and cajoled him to come to London to complete the line up. Thank God he said yes! Mike’s reputation had preceded him across the Atlantic. He had been a roadie for The New York Dolls in their final days and had not escaped the attentions of the beady eyed Malcolm McLaren. McLaren turned up to one of the very first gigs of the newly formed Count Bishops and offered Mike the job of singer with this band the Sex Pistols that he was putting together. Thank God he said no! Wearing their R’n’B purity on their sleeves, The Count Bishops began by playing lunchtime gigs in record shops rather than the pub circuit. Here it was that they would sometimes play the first two Stones albums in sequence. Such devotion quickly attracted the attention of Roger Armstrong who ran Rock On records in Camden Town. Armstrong was setting up an independent record label named Chiswick and he signed the Count Bishops to a recording contract. Emboldened, even vindicated, they went to Pathway Studio, an 8 track in Islington, and laid down a righteous 13 song demo, four of which were selected by Armstrong to be the label’s first release. Mixed and mastered, “Speedball” the EP came out in December 1975. It remains one of the best and most uncompromising rock’n’roll records ever made in Britain. Anyone who doubts me has only to listen to it. It was the first significant indie label record to be released in the 70s and it presaged a flood of similar releases, most notably The Damned on Stiff. 

Back at Silverthorne Road, Mike dumped the senior blues guitarist and installed me: 18 year old mouthy flash git with a newly acquired cream coloured Gibson SG. He asked if I knew any bass players. I said I’d look into it and persuaded my running buddy Paul Hutchinson to buy himself a bass guitar and a bass amp and get learning. He picked up a beautiful Epiphone Rivoli and a vintage Gibson bass amp and got to work. That’s how easy it was in those days. Paul Hutchinson and I had attended the first UK gigs by George Thorogood at Dingwalls earlier in the Summer and we were full of the righteous cause of Rhythm and Blues. Paul had picked up Hound Dog Taylor’s “Beware Of The Dog” live album and we played it constantly. Paul proved to be an extremely quick learner. The other guitar player was Johnnie Walker. Slightly older, innately sensible, impeccable rhythm, Johnnie was old school. None of this Punk Rock foolishness, Johnnie played like Keith Richard before he put the S back on the end of his surname. Rarely ever taking a solo, when he did he sounded like a combination of Wilko Johnson and Syd Barrett. But Johnnie was cool. Mr Reliable. Over there on the drums, the unique Sion Evans. Sion (pronounced Shawn) was from a little coastal Welsh town named Fishguard. He was the same age as me but from a completely different world. Unreconstructed to a fault, how he and Mike communicated was something to be savoured. How they understood a word the other was saying was in itself miraculous. Sion had a drum set that had to be seen to be believed. Bits of old barrels, tubs, biscuit tins, broken cymbals – but he could play it! He had a great sense of rhythm and when he clattered into a song you knew he meant business. So we got down to it: me, Mike, Paul, Johnnie and Sion. Mike had a bizarre Italian PA set up. It was falling to pieces but it worked. I needed to buy a decent amplifier and in my ignorance acquired a new Marshall transistor combo. Mike was appalled. He demanded I take it back and get something better. So I did. In Charing Cross Road, I found a 1964 Selmer Zodiac Tru-Voice 30w combo for £70. Perfect. I had my sound. We worked up a set and by the Autumn we were ready to start gigging. I’ll never forget after a chaotic but complete version of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen”, Mike broke into a broad smile and said, as much to himself as to us, “we’re a band, we can play rock’n’roll.” Mike could be so charming at times. You just wanted to please him. He was an exotic to us British kids. The real deal. “A genuine American Rhythm’n’Blues singer”, as my friend Clive described him (more of him later). 

Mike made some calls and got us some gigs. Sharing the Silverthorne Road squat with him and his lovely girlfriend Mandy (sister to the Inmates guitarist Tony Oliver) was a tall thin Irishman named Phil who ran a 2nd hand record stall in Soho Market (where he employed a young lad named Shane McGowan). One night I crashed on the sofa and Phil gave me “Nuggets” to listen to. Another vital plank in my education. I think it was through Phil that we got our first gigs supporting a French band named Gino and the Sharks. We needed a van. Mike borrowed £90 off my sister (which he scrupulously repaid) and bought an old banger of a van. Mike was a genius car mechanic. He really knew about engines. We were on the road. Then, a mere six weeks after Paul had started learning bass guitar, Mike booked us into Pathway Studio to record a single. October 26th 1978. To say I was excited would be an understatement. We recorded four songs: Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Nadine”, The Rolling Stones “Flight 505” and an original titled “Baby You Can’t”. We ditched “Flight 505” and settled on “Nadine” to be the ‘A’ side with the other two on the ‘B’ side. Mike put together a paper sleeve with an x-ray of his skull on the front and crudely mimeographed photographs of the five of us on the back. It all happened so fast. It came out on Mike’s own Hit Records with a yellow label, a first press of 500 copies. I was so proud of it. Actually, listening to it now, it’s quite a record. Where Chuck Berry’s original is a lithe and sexy car chase, ours is like an unstoppable tank trundling along, flattening whatever gets in its path. Paul’s bass is sub-sonic. How we got that much bass on to the cut amazes me. Pathway was essentially a mono studio, a relic even then, and this record sounds like nothing else. Johnnie’s intro chords cut like razors and I was pleased as punch with my best Keith Richard solo. Sion’s drums go thwack, thump, crash! Mike cajoles and pleads – “oh honey, where are you?” It’s great. I can listen to it now and thoroughly enjoy it. Promoting it at the time, I marched into the New Musical Express office on Long Acre and demanded to speak to Charles Shaar Murray. I had met him, and chatted with him, at the George Thorogood gigs and he had used me as a device in his piece on Thorogood – describing me as typical of the kind of kid who was deserting Punk for R’n’B, the upcoming ‘Blue Wave’ that he was eager to bring into being. Thus I felt that by bringing him a copy of the new single I was somehow keeping my end of the bargain. Murray emerged, looking somewhat the worse for wear, and pretended he remembered me. He took the single. “Oh you’re working with Mike now?” he said, and I felt like I was in. And he reviewed it, bless him. There it was, in the next week’s singles reviews in the NME. “Ballsy but indistinct”, he said. That would do me. The importance of a review in the NME at that time cannot be overstated. Thus we could get distribution in all the Indie record shops. The 500 copies would be sold. The sweet smell of success. There might even be a second pressing. On another front, trying to get us on the radio, Mike took me with him to visit Charlie Gillett. Mike sold “Nadine” to Charlie Gillett like it was the greatest record ever made but Gillett was not impressed. “Haven’t you got any original material?” He asked, not unreasonably. Oh yes! Flip the record over and there was “You Can’t”. Such an original. “Oh yeah,” said Gillett, “have you told Bo Diddley?” You win some, you lose some. 

Out there in the rest of the UK music scene, many things were happening. Punk was yesterday’s stale potatoes but its ramifications and ripples continued on – as they do to this day. The music press was omnipotent but not always right. A concerted effort to start a Power Pop trend with bands like The Pleasers – dressed like Gerry & The Pacemakers c.1963 – completely failed. Ian Dury had a No.1 hit record with the marvellous “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick”. Two Tone was getting underway in the Midlands – a bona fide grassroots working class movement featuring The Specials, The Beat, The Selecter etc. Back at the drugs’n’attitude, Public Image Ltd were declaring Rock to be dead and lots of people believed them. A whole new slew of misery merchants came up in the wake of Joy Division. NME employed Ian Penman and Paul Morley to further alienate their readership with quotations from Foucault and Nietzsche. Madness and Squeeze began having hits with completely English songs that recalled the heyday of The Kinks. It was a very fecund time. Sometime at the end of 1978, we got a gig at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead supporting a new band named The Pretenders. I’ve written about our experiences with The Pretenders elsewhere so let’s just say it was very exciting. They were obviously going to be very successful and it felt like we were in on it somehow – even though we weren’t. Oddly enough, Mike was always deeply suspicious of other Americans so he never really clicked with Chrissie Hynde. 

In the midst of all this, Charles Shaar Murray’s ‘Blue Wave’ was taking shape in the clubs and pubs of London. Apart from us, there were The Inmates – the former Cannibals who had re-grouped themselves around the formidable talent of singer Bill Hurley. Taking their cue more from The Animals than The Stones, they were far more polished than us and obviously primed for a record deal and any number of professional engagements. We did many gigs with them and I always enjoyed watching them do their thing. In those days, they would open their set with Eddie Cochran’s “Jeannie Jeannie Jeannie”. They would do Otis Redding’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and Wilson Pickett’s “Danger Zone”. Their first single – the Vic Maile produced “Dirty Water” – was a peach and summed them up perfectly. Murray’s own Blast Furnace & The Heatwaves could always be relied upon for a good rocking set. I remember copping the intro to Chuck Berry’s “Back In The USA” by carefully watching Murray’s fingers on his Stratocaster. His harmonica player called himself Skid Marx and this I thought captured both the humour and the politics of the scene rather well. They were fun and they could rock. From the same Canvey Island cradle that had spawned Dr Feelgood there was the Lew Lewis Reformer. They were probably the first blues band I ever saw live. Lewis was a speed freak and a Little Walter devotee. Rail thin, manic and slightly terrifying, Lewis wore Oxfam suits, braces, sported a razor haircut and kept his harps in a pint of lager. They would do Little Walter’s “Watch Yourself” with a strut and the swagger of a knife fighter. Tough stuff. He could really play. Lewis’s first single appeared on Stiff Records: “Caravan Man” b/w “Boogie On The Street” and it remains a little classic. Lewis eventually got four years jail time for holding up a Post Office with an imitation pistol. That was him. If Lew Lewis provided a sense of manic danger, The Commuters were pure knockabout. Hailing from Hemel Hempstead, they called themselves The Commuters because they spent so much time commuting between Hemel and Euston. They had a residency at the Pegasus in Green Lanes in Stoke Newington and I remember Paul and myself dragging Mike out there to see them. They were a great live band. Lenny, the lead singer, gave it so much front. Lu, the man mountain bass player, looked like a psychopath. Tim the guitar player, tall and spindly, was the only one who seemed to know what he was doing musically. Greg the drummer sometimes caught the groove, sometimes not. Pete the harmonica player played through everything, much to Tim’s annoyance. But the point about The Commuters was that they had a completely chaotic wild enthusiasm. They steamrollered through Bo Diddley’s “Roadrunner” which you might have expected, but they also did a Supremes number, for God’s sake, and an Aretha Franklin cover. Anything less like The Supremes or Aretha Franklin than The Commuters it would be hard to imagine. They also ran roughshod over Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight”. They had a few originals: “It’s Your Round Girls” being a particular favourite. Also, the wonderful “Bubble Car”. The Commuters inspired love in their audiences and we were duly smitten. Offstage, they were complete sweethearts, if utter pissheads, and an alliance was formed. We did many gigs with The Commuters. The Dublin Castle in Camden being one, and another being a club in Bicester where we were given the run of the place and paid in beer. All we could drink. Oh God… The Commuters drank us under the table. I remember playing guitar while propped up against the wall, praying for it to end. But I always was a lightweight. 

Perhaps I ought to say a word or two about Dr Feelgood. I had been a bit too young to see them in their heyday but it was really down to them that the second wave of the UK pub rock scene got started. At a time of Mike Oldfield and Yes and Genesis, Dr Feelgood had provided a way out. Short hair, Oxfam suits, short songs, attitude to burn, they showed a way forward in the mid 70s. For myself, I could never really get it. I could hear that Wilko Johnson was a remarkable rhythm guitarist, playing a Telecaster through an HH amplifier with his fingers, and I could hear that Lee Brilleaux was a great frontman and harmonica player but the rhythm section were too lumpen for me. It lurched where it should have grooved. There was no colour to the sound. It’s absurd, really. If I’d seen them back in ’74 or ’75, I’m sure I would have been massively excited by them but as it was, I preferred the sons of Feelgood, such as The Commuters or the Lew Lewis Reformer, much more than the Feelgoods themselves. At the time of the scene I’m writing about, Wilko had left Dr Feelgood, to form his own band – the Solid Senders – and had been replaced by Gypie Mayo. They weathered the Punk years and put out album after album, playing to their devoted audiences, and by the time The Inmates (say) put out their first single Dr Feelgood were almost as much of a Rock institution as Thin Lizzy. Not in that league commercially, of course, but as well established. You couldn’t go down to the Nashville or the Hope and Anchor, have a couple of pints and watch Dr Feelgood and that is really the difference. You could watch The Pirates, though, featuring Wilko Johnson’s childhood hero Mick Green on guitar. Veterans to say the least, they clattered and thumped at a very high level of proficiency. Likewise Dave Edmunds Rockpile, who were a bit too rock star really for this scene. Dave Edmunds had had a No.1 hit record after all, at the beginning of the decade, and he was signed to Led Zeppelin’s Swansong label. On bass there was Nick Lowe, star producer and hit songwriter, and there on drums was Terry Williams, soon to be whisked away to real stardom with Dire Straits. 

No girls. No girls at all. Not a single one of these bands had any girls. Such a sweaty boys club. Beer, fags, armpit dressing rooms, dirty jokes. It was all very blokey. At the time, I didn’t give this a moment’s thought. I’d been to an all boys school, after all. I knew how to muck in. Girlfriends did not generally venture backstage. 

Back down on the ground on the Cannibals front, everything was going great guns until one evening I got a phone call from Paul Hutchinson. “I’ve decided to leave The Cannibals”, he said. And I never really understood why. I couldn’t talk him out of it so now we needed a bass player again. I went to see my old mate Clive Leach who had been the bass player for Captain Comedown. He was in. We were back up and running, playing the newly opened 101 Club in Clapham, the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, Dingwalls in Camden. And then, Sion decided to quit. Damn it. That was a real setback. Sion was unique. And again, I couldn’t figure out why. 

But before Sion left, we played a very poignant benefit gig with The Inmates at the 101 Club for the family of Zenon de Fleur. Zen had got killed in a car accident. It was a great tragedy. Apart from anything else, it severed the hamstrings of The Count Bishops. Zen had been absolutely central to their sound. They struggled on without him for a little while but without his powerhouse rhythm playing, they sounded like shadows of their former selves. Zen died on March 17th 1979. Then Paul Balbi got deported for overstaying his visa and that was definitely that. A very sad end to what had been a great rock’n’roll band. Before all that happened, though, it had looked rosy for a brief moment. The Bishops (as they now officially called themselves) got on Top Of The Pops with their version of “I Want Candy”. They put out a live album (“The Bishops – Live”), a second studio album (“Cross Cuts”) and toured with Motorhead. They looked poised to become a rock’n’roll institution when fate struck them down so cruelly. Later on, when I got friendly with Stevie Lewins, he lent me a Dutch bootleg album named “Good Gear” which had been recorded in 1976 when they were briefly a four piece after Mike first left. It was a nice album, rough round the edges. No professional polish but a lot of feel. Now it’s hard to find. Poor old Count Bishops, relegated to a footnote in the history of UK Rock. But in their day, they were most mighty and righteous. I will always remember them with great affection and respect. 

Back at The Cannibals, we needed a drummer, and fast. We had gigs to do. So we held auditions. Oh Lord… Anyone who has ever auditioned drummers has my eternal sympathy. Thick and fast they came at last, and more and more and more. In the end we settled on Gary Stannard. Gary was my age and he could really play. A Keith Moon devotee, he rolled and paradiddled his way around our material with consummate ease. Mike initially thought he was too flash but I persuaded him. Gary was fun and raring to go. He was in. He added musical muscle to our sound. We got a residency at a big pub in Clapham named The Two Brewers and were beginning to build up a real following. Then we got fired for playing past last orders. It happens. Listening to the ragged tapes of those dates I’m struck by how horrendously out of tune we were most of the time. E – B – E – G# – B – E go the guitars, over and over again, trying to find a common pitch somewhere relative to the vicinity of 440hz. I was far more guilty than Johnnie. He had learned to turn down when tuning up. I had not. Never mind. The audiences didn’t seem to care. The phoney Mod revival was now well under way and we had started to do Small Faces numbers and The Who’s “Out In The Street”. My SG still bears the scars of where I used to pretend I was going to smash it. What a little twit I was. It’s funny. I always thought we were strictly a Rhythm and Blues band but really we were a noisy punk band (with a small P) playing R’n’B material. Mike knew what R’n’B was supposed to sound like but he was developing his own uniquely demented vision of what he wanted to do with it. Back in our earliest rehearsals, Mike had loaned me albums by Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, Mississippi Fred McDowell. This was a real education. But I couldn’t play like that. I could do a passable imitation of Steve Marriott on the first Small Faces album, however. As well as Keith Richard, of course. That apprenticeship was still my bedrock. 

Mike took us back into Pathway Studio to record our next single. He had a song left over from the original Inmates/ Cannibals days that he wanted to record: “I Could See Right Through You”. Plus, he and Johnnie had started writing songs together. They had come up with a song named “Pick’n’Choose”. The lyrics to these original songs were written from the point of view of the endless battle of the sexes. Girls were always out when Mike called, bugging him when they were in, chiding him for his infidelities, acting stupid, wanting commitment etc etc etc. Essentially, it was a stance adapted from The Rolling Stones “Stupid Girl”. Petulant misogyny. It was out of date then, leave alone now, but I hadn’t really noticed. At Pathway, rather than concentrate on getting the best versions of these songs down, we simply recorded everything in our repertoire. 31 tracks in four hours, breaking the house record. I had just spent the princely sum of £285 on a second-hand Rickenbacker 12 string and I wanted to overdub it on as many tracks as possible. Never mind that it was impossible to tune! I should mention that I had written a couple of ‘original’ songs with Mike too. One was a rip-off of The Beatles “Day Tripper”, the other was a rip-off of The Kinks “You’re Lookin’ Fine”. To the first, titled “Just For Fun”, Mike had written a really quite forceful denunciation of the Ruling Classes. This was something of a departure and I remember people in the front row of our gigs at The Two Brewers singing along to it. The other, titled “Lucky Charm”, was a detailed description of an eccentric girl who covers herself with superstitious paraphernalia. This business of original material was quite interesting. As these bands I’ve described all pretty much started out raiding the back catalogues of The Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, Animals etc the question of original material didn’t really come up until they started getting record deals. (I should note that Blast Furnace & The Heatwaves adapted Robert Johnson songs.) Then it suddenly became all about the publishing and original material was demanded. Thus would descend the ghastly spectre of Rock. Rhythm and Blues is black American music, even when filtered through pimply white youths misunderstanding it. However, these pimply white youths had no reference points beyond these misunderstandings of the source material and in most cases (like myself) had grown up learning to play Rock music. It’s interesting now, 45 to 50 years later, how incredibly dated the Rock of the mid to late 70s sounds, whereas the R’n’B of the 1950s and 60s still sounds vital.

So we mixed and mastered “I Could See Right Through You” b/w “Pick And Choose” but for some reason, possibly lack of money, Mike did not come up with a picture sleeve. This meant we couldn’t get distribution, despite a glowing review in the NME from Tom Robinson of all people. I think the single sold about 50 copies. We carried on gigging. The Hope and Anchor, a pub in Islington that regularly featured all the bands on the scene, decided to host a festival and did a deal with Arista Records to put out an album of the best of the sets they would record. We chose a track from our set to be included but they overruled us and put out a version of “Just For Fun”. This got a great review from The Morning Star – which was very gratifying. The album, “The London R & B Sessions”, if you can find it, is probably the best snapshot of the UK Pub Rock scene at the end of the 70s. Stealing the show by a country mile was Wilko Johnson with his berserk tribute to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. 

The Pretenders began a residency at The Marquee. Every week for a month – November 1979. I went every week. I was a shameless, gushing fan. It was beginning to dawn on me that there was something most definitely missing on the London Pub Rock R’n’B scene: Sex. I wrote a fan letter to Chrissie Hynde and begged her to let us, The Cannibals, support her, The Pretenders, the next time they played at The Marquee. Incredibly, she wrote back and said: Yes, by all means. You can do both nights. Wow… We were booked in to play December 22nd and 23rd. There was one snag. The Inmates had been playing a nightclub in Paris called The Gibus Club (funnily enough so had The Pretenders but I didn’t know that then). Their manager had very kindly arranged for us to follow on and do a week there too (the fact that The Inmates had a proper manager and we didn’t was lost on me at the time). We were supposed to be leaving on December 23rd. What? How could anything be more important than supporting The Pretenders at The Marquee? Mike didn’t seem to be particularly enthusiastic but somehow, the logistics were sorted, ferries changed etc. Our two nights at The Marquee went off OK. The first night we had all our friends and fans in and it felt like a real occasion. A high watermark of sorts. The second night was a bit of a damp squib. Chrissie Hynde had the flu. I got to hang out backstage with the rock stars. James Honeyman-Scott was lovely. He liked my Rickenbacker. Pete Farndon though, he was obviously trouble. Steve Peregrin Took (of all people) turned up and immediately keeled over. He was a big guy. He fell hard. It was definitely time to leave. In Paris, we had a blast. The French really dig rock’n’roll. They can’t play it but they really like it. “Vince Tayleur!” went the cry. If we’d had any sense we would have learned “Brand New Cadillac” and played it every set. We’d have gone down a storm. As it was, we played two sets a night and lived in a sleazy boarding house that Gary convinced us was run by an ex-Resistance fighter. We misbehaved. It was all very rock’n’roll. When I got home I slept for 18 hours straight. A page turned. 

Clive was putting a band together with his brother Gordon and the aforementioned Graham. Also, lending them class, was a keyboard player named Paul MacWhinnie. Keyboard players were a rarity on the Pub Rock scene. The idea of piano lessons and texture being somewhat alien. Paul Mac had been to lots of Cannibals gigs. He was an old mate. They were going to do only their own material, of a psychedelic flavour. I had attended one of their early rehearsals. “Stamp Out Mutants!” They had the makings of a real attitude and originality. I wanted in. It nagged at me. Clive handed in his notice to Mike who accepted it with good grace. I carried on but my heart was elsewhere. We recruited another bass player, Steve Slack. He was a real talent. Fabulous bass player and gifted songwriter. Lovely guy too. Unfortunately he had a weakness for heroin. It wasn’t very long before he was replaced by Jeff Mead. Jeff is the kind of guy that every band needs: he’s reliable, he has excellent gear which he maintains, he can play in time and in tune, he is easy to get along with. Just a gift. Jeff stuck around in The Cannibals for many, many years. Mike had found his valued assistant. One strong memory I have of this brief period of flux. We were rehearsing in a pub in South London and a black guy got up onstage to sing “High Heeled Sneakers”. My goodness, he could really sing! Turned out that it was Limmie Snell, of Limmie and the Family Cooking – a bona fide American R’n’B band that had had an international hit with a song called “You Can Do Magic”. “What’s he doing here?” I asked the fella who had come in with him. He shrugged. “Isn’t it a bit weird for him?” I pressed on. “Hard to go back to skimmed milk when you’ve tasted cream”, came the immortal response. 

The day came. I gave my notice in to Mike. He took it on the chin but I could see that he was upset. I hated to do it but I needed to move on. Bands are very much like relationships. You go through so much together and when it ends, it does hurt. Mike had had so many people use him as some kind of rock’n’roll finishing school. He was older than he let on – basically he lied about his age – and he’d been through it so many times. But the thing about Mike, then and to this day, was that he had an absolutely unshakeable belief in the righteousness of The Cannibals. He had given his life to this thing and his conviction that The Cannibals were a truly great rock’n’roll band, deserving of the highest success, was beyond dispute. The trouble was he had a tendency to rub up the wrong way anyone who was in a position to further his cause. Managers, agents, publicists, A&R men, journalists – they all had tales to tell about Mike. His stubbornness, his intransigence, rudeness etc etc etc. It was as though he resented them for being in a position to offer him what he most wanted. To be one up over him in other words. You have to eat a certain amount of humble pie (ie, bullshit) to get along in showbusiness and Mike just couldn’t do it. So he stayed on the margins. Eventually he turned this into an advantage. He started to describe what he was doing as ‘Trash’ rather than R’n’B and went on to front any number of versions of The Cannibals – deliberately emphasizing the amateurish noisiness of the music. Lots of thrashing and shouting. I couldn’t have handled it but in this way he went on to found a movement of similar bands and held ‘Nights of Trash’ where they would all play. There was a certain crossover with the nascent Psychobilly scene and it proved very fertile for a few years. 

Music was moving on, as music tends to do. The New Romantic scene was unfolding, likewise the Goth scene. No lack of sex there. For myself, perverse as ever, I went off to be a hippy and play psychedelic music with TreaTmenT. The Inner Movie of my life had moved on from 1965 to 1968. The last gig I did with The Cannibals was depping for a guitarist who had gone temporarily awol (the inimitable Mike McCann RIP) sometime in 1982. The gig got reviewed in Sounds and there was a photograph. I had long hair and was wearing a floral satin jacket with round lapels. I didn’t fit anymore. But Mike and I have always stayed friends. Clive rejoined The Cannibals, and left, and rejoined many times. Now Mike is old, and very ill. As I write this, a benefit gig is being held to try and defray his enormous medical bills. Mike phoned me up and asked me if I would come along and play Van Morrison’s “Gloria”. Of course. It will be an honour. “Bring your own lead”, says Clive. “Always bring your own lead.” And there, I feel, may be a lesson in discretion for us all. 

(Note: since this was written Rachel Nagy died in still unexplained circumstances. A tragedy.)

For me, it happened like this. In April 2003 I was getting a lift back from a session gig courtesy of Ben out of Cornershop, who also does press for Rough Trade records. Ben is a true believer in the power of new music. He has never lost his enthusiasm for the excitement of hearing new things. Total opposite to me. Unless I’m forced, I will only ever listen to things I KNOW I like. But I’m getting a lift, so I must be gracious and, besides, it’s invigorating sometimes to be with someone who is so interested in new music – whatever it may be. And he wants to play me something. Thinks I’ll like it. He bungs it on the car stereo. Bass intro, punky guitar, drums – well at least it’s rock’n’roll – but I’m already worrying that it’ll just be some kids who have learned to play a few licks off a bunch of Ramones and Cramps records. But no. There’s a stop cue and then the vocal comes in – “Come on, baby”…  

How many rock’n’roll records start with “Come on, baby”? I mean, please… But this woman (already I don’t want to call her a girl singer) is singing it like it’s something really special. And I don’t mean that in some corny condescending way like, she makes it sound brand new. On the contrary, she sounds like she’s sung it a million times and it’s as natural to her as breathing – in other words, she sings with the ease and assurance of a real blues singer. But this woman is young! Or at least I think she’s young. And white! Or at least I think she’s white. She’s from Detroit. She fronts this band. What’s her name? 

I ask Ben. Rachel. Rachel Nagy. Nagy? Nagy. OK. Apparently she’s a real character. Never sung in a band before. She was a friend, she was a butcher by trade, she was a stripper, she was a drunk, she was a handful. How it happened was one day this Detroit garage band had decided they needed a female singer, and someone suggested Rachel, the blonde who people kept tripping over when she was sleeping off a hangover. Turns out she could sing pretty good.

Damn right. I’m taking all this information in while I’m noticing that the tracks on the cd are really short and to the point, and that they sound strangely familiar – like I’ve heard them in a different form somewhere else. They only do covers, Ben tells me, by way of explanation. They like to cover really obscure soul and r’n’b tunes from the late 50s/ early 60s – stuff that hardly anybody’s heard, obscure ‘B’ sides, long forgotten album tracks etc. The way they tell it, there are too many songs in the world already, and some of the good ones never got heard by enough people so they’re just gonna play the ones they like and that they feel they can do justice to.

Impressive? That’s fantastic! Such humility! So commendable in a rock’n’roll band! Archivists, librarians, true devotees, righteous rockers. Oh God! This band is for me. 

Rock’n’roll has many strains. Those of us here in its church pay many different obeisances. Some prize a good tune, others a wicked groove, a bitchin’ solo. You know… Some of us like girl group pop from the 60s – The Shangri La’s, The Ronettes, The Crystals etc. If we like them then the chances are good we like soul and r’n’b from the golden days when Motown was young and merely the biggest of hundreds of little independent labels all across the USA. But then we might also like The Ramones, and if we do, we probably have more than a little time for the great Detroit bands: The Stooges, MC5, Mitch Ryder etc. But it can be a lonely faith. Sifting for scratched up singles on the internet, bidding the housekeeping money on an original copy of Barbara George’s “I Know” on the AFO label, wondering if we can also afford that Sugar Pie DeSanto on Chess – and is the condition really vg? Or is it really tf (totally fucked)? And it can be dispiriting to continually have to face the non-comprehension of friends and contemporaries – “Why don’t you just buy the cd compilation?” – whose faith is willing but essentially weak. Thus it is that for a true believer the emergence of a band like The Detroit Cobras is almost too good to be true. Like a fantasy reward we had long given up on ever receiving.

So Ben was right. I do like them. Ben grins, and promises to send me a promo. He mentions that they are playing in New York next week. At the Bowery Ballroom. Astonishing! I’m going to be in New York next week! And I KNOW The Bowery Ballroom. I played there once. 

Thus it is that the next week I catch up with my buddy in New York (who just happens to be a beautiful and glamorous blonde lady) and we go down to the Bowery Ballroom and check our names off the guest list and SASHAY inside. New York is like being in a movie anyway, but this is an especially cool episode. The Fleshtones are on first and put on such a polished show that I’m thinking that The Cobras had better be good. (Already they have become “The Cobras” since I’ve played the “Mink, Rabbit or Rat” album into the ground for the last few days.) The city of New York has just banned smoking in public places but there’s Rachel onstage with a cigarette claiming, “it’s a prop”. She’s superb. She’s perfect. The sound is lousy and the performance a bit sloppy but The Cobras have so much rock’n’roll righteousness going for them that they can actually afford to be a bit sloppy. But… This is a dangerous game. It’s dangerous to allow nonchalance to become sloppiness because it can lead to contempt for the audience, which is contempt for oneself. And that’s unacceptable. Also, in the market place nowadays, it’s clear that there is no room for sloppiness of any kind. In that sense, The Cobras were nowhere near slick enough. But fuck that. The Cobras aren’t slick; they’re a real rock’n’roll band just like the old days. I’m 43 and they made me feel 19. Somehow, and I cannot understand how, they are not an anachronism, they are not IRONIC, they’re not being deliberately RETRO… Thank God. Something real, and tough, and true, and hip, and funny, and stylish, that ROCKS!

Yes, it was more than wonderful to see The Detroit Cobras in New York in April of 2003. It was love. For the first time in many years, I was in love with a band that was still actually functioning. 

I downloaded as many tracks as I could find on the Internet and was overjoyed when Rough Trade here in London got a few vinyl import copies of their two albums. Ben had sent me the new 7 track ep out on Rough Trade, “Seven Easy Pieces”, that began with Rachel saying “very nice!” in the sexiest and most sardonic manner imaginable – before launching into an epic rock’n’roll stomp called “Ya Ya Ya (Looking For My Baby)” with Rachel plaintively singing how she’s “looking for my baby but my baby ain’t nowhere around”. Still, when she finds him she’s going to “take him by the balls and drag him all the way back to town”, so it’s probably wise not to feel too sorry for her. Yes, like so many guys, I love a ball-breaker. Rachel’s the best, and toughest sounding rock’n’roll singer in the world right now. There’s no-one in her league. 

So how can The Detroit Cobras exist?  How can they get every detail so right and STILL be contemporary? How can their records sound so good and STILL be modern? How do they KNOW? They’ve been criticized (by fools!) for not doing any original songs.  Any idiot can write songs. All you need is a guitar and three chords. What The Detroit Cobras do is so much more interesting: The trick for them is to unearth a forgotten gem – a song that only a true devotee would know. They’ll take, say, an early 60s ‘B’ side by Irma Thomas (that’s NEVER been anthologized on cd!) and boil the brass and piano parts down to two sprightly guitars, maybe simplify the bass line and bring it forward a little bit, possibly up the tempo just a tad, you know, as a nod towards the punk aesthetic, and they keep the song short, specific and to the point, absolutely no padding with indulgent solos. And then, out in front, Rachel makes every song her own. 

Unless you’ve heard them, I can’t convince you. You’ll just think I’m bigging up a band I like and in a way that’s true. How could I not love The Detroit Cobras? They validate everything I believe about good rock’n’roll: short sexy songs, tightly played, with ingeniously unfussy arrangements. In interviews, The Cobras reveal themselves to be such high-minded purists that they would probably hate the comparison, but the nuts and bolts of what they do is virtually identical to what The Beatles once did to things like Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got A Hold On Me”, Barrett Strong’s “Money”, or The Shirelles “Baby It’s You”. It amounts to taking what may be quite exotic and polished arrangements by trained professional musicians and re-casting them for souped-up electric guitars and drums. If that sounds easy, you should try it sometime. Besides, when The Beatles were doing it in the early 60s, they had an unplundered sackful of classic songs to choose from that were virtually unknown to their audience. Fast-forward forty years and all of those hit songs are in the public sub-conscious, memorized from any number of compilations, played by a million bar bands across the years. The Cobras could be the greatest bar band in the world if they wanted to be; it’s their attitude and choice of material that marks them out. It has to be impeccable, and it is. Only true believers could find and lovingly tease such obscure tucked-away ‘B’ side gems into such vibrant, breathing life. They record for a label called Sympathy For The Record Industry and their albums are 13 or 14 tracks long and still clock in at less than 32 minutes. Rip-off, you say. You’re wrong. 13 or 14 songs in 32 minutes mean no padding, no waffling, no bullshit.  All the songs have memorable tunes and good lyrics and strong grooves. They don’t sound alike in the way that The Ramones (bless them) sounded alike. There are fast songs and slow songs; in amongst the soul and r’n’b there are blues and country songs, surf, pop, even the occasional waltz! The cd’s are also pressed in vinyl editions with no barcode on the covers. Think about that for a moment. No bar code. Think about the implications of that in the modern retail industry. Their graphics are mildly pornographic: featuring Rachel with an expression like “Oh yeah?” on her face.

It’s hard to get concrete information. The first album “Mink, Rat Or Rabbit” came out in 1998. The second one, “Love, Life and Leaving” came out in 2001. The 7 track ep, “Seven Easy Pieces”, came out in 2003. They’ve recorded some tracks for compilation albums in Detroit; they’ve put out the odd limited pressing single. Who’s in, who’s out of the band, seems to fluctuate, there’s quite a floating line-up. The only real constants are Rachel and Maribel Restrepo on guitar. I’ve been putting off writing this piece for too long because of a lack of biographical information, but the hell with it, it’s a gush and a labour of love. I’m sorry. But it’s personal. When “Cha Cha Twist” (the first track on the first album – the one that starts with “Come On Baby”) got used in a Coke-Cola advert on TV my first reaction was outrage: How DARE they? The Detroit Cobras are MINE! These yuppie fucks don’t get the importance of the Cobras; they’re just USING them to sell a product. Then I realized I was being, uh, irrational. It was GOOD that they were making some money, that they were getting some exposure. Wasn’t it? I worried about the band, and Rachel in particular. Some months ago, Rough Trade had put out a sampler of a bunch of their acts covering each other’s songs. The Cobras had done The Strokes “Last Nite”. Of course, this was not the kind of song they would normally cover and where the original was a foursquare rip-off of Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life”, the Cobras version lent it a rock’n’roll mambo feel. But Rachel’s vocal, pitched low, gave the song pathos that Julian Casablancas could only dream about. The trouble was it sounded so beaten, so world weary, so sad. Really, just so sad. It would break your heart. I was hoping this was method acting but worried that it wasn’t. I’d heard dark rumours of bad things happening on the road. Oh God that would be just too painfully fitting: Isn’t that exactly what happened to Detroit’s last great rock’n’roll singer, the aforementioned Mr. Pop? When The Stooges were far and away the greatest rock’n’roll band on the planet, what did they do? Got hooked on junk and threw it all away. 

Anyway, enough of this maudlin speculation. It’s 4:10am and the last I heard was The Detroit Cobras were in LA working with Jackie DeShannon, who wrote at least one of the tunes on their albums. Next up they’re gigging around the West Coast and if any of you lucky Americans get to read this in time, I suggest you go and see them. I hope they achieve great success, and that they can handle it when it comes, and that they go on to make many more magnificent records; but even if they split this very day, the records they’ve made will last as long as good rock’n’roll is listened to.  

And Rachel, if you’re reading: Thank you for singing like that.

                          

In the library today I put on the Sun Sessions to cheer me up while I was working. When it came around to the bridge of  “Tryin’ To Get To You” I found myself spontaneously weeping. Curious. I couldn’t think of any concrete reason for this. I had already become quite emotional during “Milkcow Blues Boogie” – specifically the point where he sings:
 

   “In the evenin’, don’t that sun look good goin’ down

    But don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome when your baby’s not around”                                                                         

But that’s the beauty of the poetry of the blues. Isn’t it? 

I thought about Elvis. How enigmatic a figure he really was, and is. How long after his death his power remains completely undiminished. How, if anything, it has increased and codified. There are places in the South where he is prayed to as a saint. But what does that prayer represent?

There’s something about him, something that has never been fathomed, even now. So many people have written about him, so much verbiage. Yet the secret is untouched. One can point out how innovatory he was in terms of race – a white man on his first record singing black music as white music, and then, on the other side, singing white music as black music – and certainly it’s true that he was completely unique in this respect. But there’s something else. The existence of this something is universally acknowledged by those interested in pop culture and it’s history, but nobody has ever got to the bottom of what it really is. It’s a fact that first editions of the Sun singles (there were only five of them) are among the most prized collector’s items, regularly selling at auction for upwards of three to five thousand dollars each – even in less than mint condition.  And it’s a fact that they apparently meant little or nothing to Elvis himself: one felt he regarded them as slightly embarrassing.  In an interview clip I saw from ’69 where a journalist asks him about the Sun sessions Elvis’s only response is: “They sure got a lotta echo”.  Yet, seemingly completely effortlessly, Elvis, Scotty Moore and Bill Black created a sound that resonates just as perfectly and mysteriously now as it did the day they made it. The perfection part is easy to nail: perfect recordings perfectly capturing perfect performances. But the mysterious aspect continues to elude explanation. The recipe for the atmosphere on those records is so superficially easy to conjure: three Southern musicians – two of them seasoned professionals, one, the singer, a fresh new talent – having a good time “goosing up” some country standards and some black r’n’b. The music is wonderful, fresh, vibrant etc. But that’s not it. What is it about those records that is so unique? It’s something to do with America. Some sort of genuine truth about America. I’m sure it is. But what is that?

If you don’t care about America, if Americana has no allure, chances are you don’t like Elvis anyway. But if, like me, you’re hooked on America, then there’s something in these records that tells you something about the place. Something that you need to know, that will predicate your conception of what America really is. Truths about America are everywhere, good and bad. But what kind of truth is this?  A truth that actually tells you nothing but suggests a secret, a secret that contains the key to something of fundamental importance, that you knew but had somehow forgotten.

In cultural terms, it MUST be something really quite substantial when you consider that these records provided the foundation stone for the career of a man who brought about a complete revolution in the attitudes and behaviour of vast numbers of people in the Western world – without even thinking about it, without even being aware of having done it. On some very real levels, Elvis changed everything. And this revolution continues to reverberate, as if Elvis rang some deep primordial bell that, once sounded, just gets louder and louder forever, or until the civilisation finishes. 

In 1977, in his obituary of Elvis, Lester Bangs wrote: “Elvis replaced ‘How Much Is That Doggie In the Window’ with ‘Let’s fuck’, and the world is still reeling from the implications of that”. What Lester couldn’t have known, dying as he did himself a mere five years after Elvis, is how completely Elvis’s power would remain undiminished, untouched. “Worship is a habit that’s hard to break”, wrote Nik Cohn of Elvis as far back as 1969. How completely he was right. Only the other day I heard on the radio an interview with a president of one of Elvis’s fan clubs in the UK, and the man was positively incandescent with worship.

Maybe it is just that animalistic call to carnal action that will always resonate with human beings under any circumstances. But isn’t it more than sex, isn’t it freedom as well? When Elvis sings that line I quoted earlier:

 “In the evening, don’t that sun look good goin’ down”

there is something in his 19 year old voice that offers to the Southern sunset a distillation of yearning. It’s like a wish. A real wish. What is he wishing for? This young man made of the clay of rural America? Whatever it is, it’s something to do with the deepest dreams and wishes of America itself. 

Elvis made far more crappy records in his (relatively) brief career than good ones. Even mediocre ones shine like beacons throughout his post Sun discography. As early as 1957 he was already parodying himself on songs like “Teddy Bear”. Any fan will tell you of his “good” periods: but  what that actually translates to are periods when he made fewer bad records than at other times. Yes, there are a few classics in there – “Suspicious Minds”, “Guitar Man”  to name but two – but compared to the Sun sessions? Only “Stranger In My Own Home Town”, from the “In Memphis” album – where Elvis sings the title line over and over again into the long fade-out – THAT has the same air of mystery about it. But there it’s as if he is desperately searching for something he has lost.  And what of the bad records? The terrible soundtrack albums, the abominable ballads from the dregs of Tin Pan Alley where Elvis sings like a man in a stupor of indifference. How could he have gone from such great artistic heights to such appalling depths of schlock without even seeming to notice?

There’s a clip I’ve seen of Elvis’s first Hollywood audition. He is handed a guitar with no strings on, just a prop. He looks at it in amazement before taking it and miming to “Blue Suede Shoes”. He does a fine job because he was always a professional but I wonder what he was thinking when he saw that the guitar had no strings. I mean, Elvis was never a great guitar player but subtract his contribution from the Sun sessions and they would fall apart. He played a vital role, he played it honestly and as well as he knew how. Following his success, that was taken away from him. He was made to feel that it wasn’t even remotely important. How that must have negated all those evenings spent alone in his bedroom in Memphis, strumming along to his favourite songs. All those Arthur Crudup songs, all that Hank Williams, and Wynonie Harris, and Junior Parker. Remember, in the 1968 TV special, how happy he looked to be actually playing the guitar again? Not miming, but really playing on a big old Gibson with a fat sound? In the prosaic terms of a career in showbusiness, Elvis had obviously only wanted to be a movie star. Singing came too easily for him to really have that much respect for it. But playing that Jimmy Reed song (“Baby What You Want Me To Do?”) over and over, as he did, playing the same turnaround at the end of every chorus with the delighted look of a child who has re-discovered a much loved toy that had been lost. Doesn’t he look great? Doesn’t your heart go out to him? Suppose Elvis had never met the Colonel, had never achieved much more than local success: the whole fabric of Western culture would have been different but, perhaps, Elvis Presley would still be alive.

Reading the biographies, it’s astounding that he lasted as long as he did. He punished his body so terribly. How valiantly his spirit must have fought against the abominable regimen of junk food and hideous chemicals its desperate owner forced it through. Talk about a soul in torment!  Elvis gave his life. He really did. He was a king in a republic with no history or culture of kings. So when you listen to that music, that music that he made as a 19 year old truck driver from Memphis; then as a young god of 20, 21, don’t forget to genuflect a little. And then get “real, real gone for a change”. Because it’ll never, ever, ever be that way again.

Written when I heard the news of Joe Strummer’s tragically early death.

——

Back in the winter of 1975, when I was 15, I went with my sister and a friend to see Roger Ruskin Spear – the ex-Bonzo Dog – put on his Kinetic Wardrobe show at Hampstead Town Hall. The supporting act was a rough and ready rock’n’roll band called the 101’ers. I remember being excited and impressed when the singer and guitarist launched into a blistering version of The Beatles’ ‘Back In The USSR’. Little did I know I was watching Joe Strummer. He was just a bloke with curly hair yelling at the microphone and bashing hell out of a Fender Telecaster. I looked at him and I knew I liked him. He was alright.

Within a year of course, punk rock had exploded and Joe Strummer was fronting a new band called The Clash who played all their own material: songs with titles like ‘White Riot’ and ‘I’m So Bored With The USA’. Having seen him with The 101’ers bought me some playground kudos amongst those of my schoolmates who actually believed me. Among these was a boy called Guy who was good at art and who was the first at my school to adopt the punk look and attitude. We became friends and he would bring round things like The Sex Pistols ‘Spunk’ bootleg and The Clash’s ‘Capital Radio’ interview ep for me to tape. Armed with Mark P’s magnificent dictum: “Here is a chord, here is another, here is a third, now go form a band”, I had  become reasonably adept on guitar, and on Christmas Day 1977, Guy came round unannounced (nobody comes round unannounced on Christmas Day) and asked me to teach him. I showed him how to play the intro to ‘Pretty Vacant’ and he walked off back to Earl’s Court happy as a lark.

Before this, though, the Clash’s first album had come out and I had bought it and played it loud and often and taken it to parties and annoyed people with it who would rather have been getting off to Genesis and Peter Frampton. I didn’t like the second album, toe-ing, sheep-like, to the then- fashionable line that The Clash had somehow sold out by allowing it to be produced by an American mainstream producer. But the third album, ‘London Calling’, was the goods and no mistake – ‘Exile On Main Street’ for my generation, the best album made by any of the British punk bands of the late 70s. By the time it came out, Christmas 1979, I had become what you might laughingly call a professional musician, and I remember hearing the title track for the first time in a Paris nightclub where I was playing with my first ‘proper’ band, The Cannibals. I was 19 and I was dancing with a pretty girl and there was Joe Strummer’s voice singing “London Calling”. I’m all grown up now and I am extremely wary of overly romanticising rock’n’roll (for good reason) but I can’t deny that THAT, that is a very fond memory indeed. 

Fast forward more than 20 years to the summer of 2002 and I get a call from a friend of a friend, a colleague of a colleague, the sitar player from Cornershop. She’s double-booked herself and she’s heard that I play sitar. Could I dep for her on a few festival gigs with Cornershop? 

 “How long have I got to practice?” I say. 

 “Three weeks”, she replies.

 “What’s the money?”

 “Crap”.

 OK. The first gig is in front of 45,000 bozo Oasis fans at Finsbury Park. They chuck plastic bottles but they’re so far away they can’t reach me. So far, so good. The last of the gigs is a festival in Cardiff. The only time available for soundcheck is first thing in the morning so we’re travelling the night before in a sleeper tourbus. The meet is outside the rehearsal studio at 10pm. So I turn up on time outside The Depot in Brewery Road with my two sitars in their monstrous cases and there’s the tourbus. It’s locked so I knock on the driver’s window to get him to open up the equipment trailer so I can load my sitars and get on board, grab a decent bunk. As I’m putting the sitars in I notice that none of the equipment looks at all familiar. With a hesitant air I ask the driver:

 “This is Cornershop’s bus, isn’t it?”

 “Oh no, mate”, he replies, “this is Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros!” Close! I haul the babies off the trailer and wander down the road where I can see another tourbus. I knock on the door.

 “Is this Cornershop’s bus?” 

 “No mate, this is Alabama 3. Where are you headed?” 

 “Cardiff”, I reply.

 “Oh we’re doing that gig. You can come with us.” 

I make my excuses: “Thanks but I better wait for the right bus. I don’t want to piss off the tour manager.”

 “OK. See you there!” 

 “Cheers”. 

I wander back towards the Depot. As I’m standing on the street, looking forlorn with two sitar cases in tow, who should emerge from the building but Joe Strummer himself. He smiles broadly. He walks over to where I’m standing. He speaks.

 “Alright? How ya doing?” 

I smile back. I’m feeling a bit nervous. I’ve met lots of famous people and I don’t get nervous – but now I’m feeling a bit nervous. This man was so much a part of my youth, so much a part of everything I ever aspired to join in with. I explain my situation: why I’m standing on the street with two sitars in big cases, how I don’t do mobile phones (“Neither do I”, he chuckles) and where is the Cornershop tourbus? He listens attentively. He deliberates. Then he says, “Tell you what. Put your sitars on my bus and we’ll go down the pub and you can use my guitarist’s mobile to phone your tour manager, find out what’s going on.”

 Wow.

“OK,” I agree, feeling not quite unlike a fool. I pick up the cases but Joe Strummer says, “Here y’are”, and takes one of them off me and carries it over to the door of his bus. He unlocks the door and puts the case inside and I put the other one inside. He locks the door. We walk down the deserted road together. He has just finished rehearsals for his tour and is about to embark upon it. He is relaxed and amiable. I am overawed and uptight and worried.  I ask him if he still lives in West London but it turns out that he has lived in Somerset for several years now. 

“I thought I hadn’t seen you on the streets for awhile”, I say, and don’t like the way it comes out. But it’s true! I used to see him around Notting Hill and Portobello on a regular basis and it was always nice to know that Joe was still in the neighbourhood. I tell him how the area is being turned into a yuppie theme-park, how he wouldn’t recognize the end of Westbourne Grove, how the Blue Sky café has been closed down. I realise I’m whingeing but he looks sympathetic. We arrive at the pub and Joe introduces me to all the members of his band who are standing outside the bar, merry and getting merrier. He commandeers the guitar player’s mobile phone.

 “You call your tour manager and I’ll get you a drink. What you drinking?”

 “Um, OK. A pint of bitter please.” Joe Strummer goes inside and leans on the bar with a tenner in his hand. I am instructed in how to use the mobile phone and I call the tour manager. I have gone to the wrong studio! I should be at Terminal which is by London Bridge! Miles and miles away!

 “Don’t worry”, says Yaron the unflappable tour manager, “get in a cab. We won’t go without you.” 

I hand back the phone to its owner. Now I really feel like a fool. And here’s Joe Strummer with a pint for me. 

 “Thanks Joe”, I say. I need a cigarette. I produce my packet of Cutter’s Choice tobacco. Joe produces HIS packet of Cutter’s Choice tobacco and clinks mine with it. Hey, I smoke the same cigarettes as Joe Strummer, says the16 year old in my head. Meanwhile the 42 year old nincompoop that I have become explains the situation. But how am I going to find a cab? This whole area is virtually an industrial estate. 

 “I’ll get the barman to call you one”, says Joe. He hands me a key. “You better go back and get your sitars off the bus. Don’t forget to lock it up after you. I’ll watch your pint.” He takes it off me and he goes back into the bar to get me a cab. I trot back up the road to the bus, get the sitars, lock up carefully. When I get back to the pub Joe has my pint carefully lodged behind him. I retrieve it gratefully. Everyone is chuckling at my predicament. Hapless is the word I’d use. But the cab arrives before the conversation dies. I down the rest of my pint, feeling embarrassed that I won’t get to buy him one back. As the band look on Joe carries one of my sitars to the cab while I carry the other one. 

 “Thanks, Joe”, I say sheepishly. “Thanks for everything. You’re a gentleman.“

And I wish there was some way to convey to him just HOW much of a gentleman I think he is. As I clamber in he says: 

 “Say hello to Tjinder from the Mescaleros. Don’t forget to give it some …” He gestures with his arm and clenched fist to indicate strength and commitment and I’m off. I look back out the window and Joe Strummer is waving goodbye to me.

And now I learn that that hale and hearty man, that true gentleman of the road, of rock’n’roll, is dead. At 50, of a suspected heart attack, three days before Christmas. What a shitty Christmas present for his wife and two kids. What a shitty Christmas present for all of us. For we are all impoverished by Joe Strummer’s death. Whether we give a flying stuff for The Clash, or the Mescaleros, or rock’n’roll at all, we are all impoverished by the loss of a great big-hearted man who believed in what he did and who did it for all the right reasons. Talented, genuine, truthful, he was unique. The music business is full of petty little people. Joe Strummer was not one of them. He was an old-school rock’n’roller, someone who cared. God bless him.  

This is a piece I wrote in 1988. I wished that Lester Bangs had written an obituary for Sandy Denny so I decided to try and write one myself. Revised slightly in 2000.

————————————————————————

What’d she have to go and die for? This woman, this heartbreaker. Wasn’t it enough that she could make me weep over songs that were moribund 100 years before I was born? Anyone else falls down a flight of stairs and they maybe bruise their hip or sprain their ankle. Not Sandy Denny, oh no, she had to have a cerebral haemorrhage and die. God, what a waste. What a stupid, senseless, criminal waste. Maybe she’d done all her best stuff anyway, and was doing us all a favour. That’s harsh. So what? Aren’t we always callous? What do we care if we make the parents cry and the friends spit blood? But in this case it’s inappropriate. Harshness in this discussion would only indicate a profound misunderstanding of Sandy Denny’s life and art. What matters is that she breathed life into a dead culture: with the purity of her voice and the sincerity and warmth of her spirit she brought eyesight to the blind, caused the lame to walk, the dumb to talk. Suddenly all those poor dead soldiers, those star-crossed lovers, those cruel sea captains, wicked goblins, calculating witches – all those forgotten ciphers of the long dead, pagan, oral culture of these islands found a voice, true and penetrating. Tam Lyn stirred in his yew tree, poor Nancy wailed for her lover – slaughtered on the banks of the Nile, Lord Donald fulfilled his murderous wrath at his faithless wife and the hapless Matty Groves; they and their companions in our ancient folklore lived again, to inform and amuse and distress a generation they would scarcely have believed possible.

She didn’t just sing folk songs, in fact, her own songs and the songs of her contemporaries far outnumber the traditional elements in her catalogue. But I would always be scanning the label for a Trad.Arr. Denny, or better still, a Trad. Arr. Fairport, because it was her work with Fairport Convention that will be treasured as long as there are people with, as Jimi Hendrix put it, “any kinda hearts and ears”. She joined them in 1968, even though she thought their album was “dreadful”, because she was fed up with trudging round the folk clubs on her own. And there it is on the first track of the first album she made with them, that voice: so calm and serene, so human and accessible. But it’s not just that. That may be the most important thing but there’s also the musicology bit – which does apply. She had an unerring, impeccable knack for phrasing. Tie-ing a note across an irregular number of beats, Sandy always finished what she started with breath and time to spare. She had the very, very rare gift of being able to make time do her bidding. I don’t want to start using words like rallantando and sostenuto because then it gets esoteric and piss-elegant and also, far worse, misses the point. Sandy wasn’t employing the devices of a trained, professional singer, she was singing from the heart and if she held onto a note, it was because the words she was singing were especially important. She had no academic reverence for these songs. No stifling kid-gloves or suffocating archivist awe. She sang them because she liked them, because they told real stories and brought with them messages from dead ages. When Sandy sings on ‘A Sailor’s Life’: “She wrung her hands, and she tore her hair, she was like a young girl in gra-a-a-a-ave despair”, the anguish of the lover precariously perched in a little boat on an endless ocean becomes so real it hurts – and then the centuries melt and one human being’s mortal dread becomes another’s art becomes another’s tears. That was Sandy Denny’s achievement.

She left the Fairports after three albums – their best by far – and put her own Fotheringay band together. This didn’t last long, leaving only one album which contains The Banks of the Nile – possibly her greatest recorded performance. She made a couple of classy but patchy solo albums, rejoined Fairport, left again, made another classy but patchy solo album, and then fell down those fucking stairs. 

Trouble is, I think she was one of those people who don’t realise how gifted they are. Modest, unassuming, diffident, infuriating. The plain fact is that her performances of her own and her contemporaries’ songs weren’t as good as her singing folk. Perhaps it was because the traditional material was not her own that she could approach it so unselfconsciously, with such sublime effortlessness. Whatever, singing her own songs against the big, professional productions on her solo albums she was never so impressive as when she sang folk songs in front of the amiable clutter of the Fairports. Easy to say she turned slick but it wouldn’t be true. Anyone who rushed out to buy the big boxed set when it came out will testify that the giggly, nervous woman who introduces track one – recorded at her last ever gig – was neither slick nor professionally polished in any way.

People are so damned reverent. The compilers of that boxed set were far too close to Sandy the person. Everyone I know who bought it never plays it. Like me, they taped the tracks they wanted and let the box gather dust. The Fairport albums, however, are worn and scratched and dog-eared. The compilers of the box wanted us all to know what a sensitive and brilliant songwriter Sandy was. The message reads that her finest work consisted of obscure lyrics, finely crafted arrangements, tasteful string sections etc etc – but this is chaff compared to one line from The Banks of the Nile or She Moved Through the Fair, or even her devil-may-care roistering versions of Bob Dylan’s Million Dollar Bash or Down in the Flood.

The point is that Sandy Denny is dead but when she was alive she recorded some dozen or so folk songs that are quite timeless and transcendent; representing, as they do, the finest flowering of British folk singing and which, on their release, succeeded in imbuing the musical manifestations of an ancient, indigenous oral tradition with new life, at a time when that tradition had never been closer to extinction.

And now? Sandy’s been dead for a long time now, 22 years and counting, and the folk tradition is pretty much extinct. Now everything has inverted commas around it and how can folk survive that? No. Maybe she was singing those old, old songs for us down here through some kind of divine oversight. An oversight that took 31 years to be noticed and rectified. I can’t imagine why else she didn’t just sprain her ankle.

“So come all ye roving minstrels, and together we will try

To rouse the spirit of the earth, and move the rolling tide.”

I decided to make a compilation of the Faces for the usual reason: an anally retentive desire to put all my favourite tracks in one place. But even as I struggled over track listing, running order etc. I realised the essential futility of the exercise. Compilation or no, I would never stop listening to the original albums all the way through – duff tracks, fillers and all. Why? Because I truly love the Faces, and critical judgement is always made redundant by true love (thank God). I persevered though, because it beats working, and a lot of my old vinyl is getting a bit knackered, and it would be nice to lay copies on my friends – some of whom still need to understand the truth of the beauty of the Faces’ slim legacy. 

OK. The kind of official line in the rock’n’roll history books is that the Faces were great live but made mostly lousy records and that the solo albums Rod Stewart was making at the same time were much better. Hmmm… I don’t think I’m insensitive to nuance, let alone fine musicianship and good songwriting, so how come I’ve always loved them all as a glorious whole? When I was a kid, “Long Player” would go on after “Every Picture Tells A Story” and it would move me just as much. But it’s true: Rod’s albums were as finely crafted as the Faces albums were thrown together. That was part of the Faces appeal: they weren’t struggling to complete a work of art, they were having themselves a fine old time and they wanted to share it with us. A worthy motive. And more often than not, they succeeded in getting it across.

But there was more to them than just partying. The overwhelming fact that I want to emphasize is how great and truly under-rated a songwriter was Ronnie Lane. His songs for the Faces – whether sung by him or by Stewart – are like virtually nothing else in the history of British music. Yes, he’s in the tradition of the other great London songwriters of the period – Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, and David Bowie – but he has none of the slyness of Davies or the toughness of Townshend, and he is the very antithesis of Bowie’s self-conscious artiness. Rather, his songs combine vulnerability and directness in a way that is as completely real and human as conversation between friends. It’s truthfulness, and he manages to express very strong emotions like love and nostalgia and regret without ever once becoming sentimental or sloppy. That’s a hard trick to turn. He also has a wonderful sense of humour and childlike wonder. I remember the first time I really listened to “Stone” from the first album; I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a traditional folk song for kids. I still think it’s his masterpiece in many ways, but then “Tell Everyone” has got to be among the most beautiful love songs I know. Who else has written a song about being glad to wake up with your partner because you love them – without descending into slop? Ronnie Lane makes it real because, presumably, it was. And then there’s that line in “Debris”:

“Oh, you was my hero, now you are my good friend”

– Where does THAT come from? All I know is it puts a lump in my throat every time.

Poor old Ronnie Lane, dying of multiple sclerosis like that. He wasn’t strong enough. Certainly it’s true that the Faces were never the same after he left – although Tetsu Yamauchi, faced with the impossible task of replacing him, did as good a job as anybody could have reasonably expected.  Rod Stewart was strong enough to go on to become a huge international megastar (and bore most of his old fans into stupefaction). Ron Wood was strong enough to join the Rolling Stones but allowed his individuality as a musician to be completely sublimated in the process. So he got rich. Big deal. He never made music with the Stones like he did with the Faces. The Stones just gobbled him up, the way they do, and there he remains to this day. Kenny Jones wasn’t strong enough to replace Keith Moon in the Who but that didn’t stop him from trying. More’s the pity. The less said about that the better. I don’t know what happened to Ian McLagan but it’s a safe bet that he hasn’t done anything to top his work with the Faces. 

See, the Faces weren’t like the Stones, or the Who. Like them, they were a London band – the quintessential London band of their time – but they weren’t about ruthlessness, brutishness, power, psychotic rage. They were about fun, and camaraderie, and the joys of being a bit young and foolish, a bit reckless. They were about friendship and the healing power of good rock’n’roll. They were about dressing up and staying out late, falling in love and bringing your bird to meet your mates, hoping they’ll get on (but not TOO well). They were about drinking a bit too much and playing a few good old ones, writing a few new good old ones. Telling terrible jokes, putting up with each other’s moodies, shouting a bit, arguing, making up, laughing, being as real as it’s possible to be if you’re a young street-smart working-class London male who plays music for a living in the early 1970s.

And that’s why the Faces mattered, and why nothing like them could ever happen again. They were completely a product of their time, and looking back now – in this suspicious modern landscape of endless second-guessing – the best of their music reaches out and wraps the listener in a warm blanket of good-natured humanity. Like a good friend’s arm round your shoulders when you’re feeling a bit down. And it doesn’t matter that Rod Stewart turned out to be such a disappointment, that Ron Wood became such a cartoon. It matters that Ronnie Lane died, because he was the most talented one, and he was never recognised as such. But that’s the harshness of life and death: he was just too unassuming – as his best work attests – to ever push himself forward; and then nature marked his card so cruelly. No, what matters is that the Faces did exist once; the conditions for their existence were possible once, and the best of the music they made together will stand, for as long as people listen, as actual proof that it once was possible for rock’n’roll to express something other than careerism and calculation, it was possible for it to express humanity and community, truthfulness and friendship – things that make it worthwhile being alive.  And that’ll have to do.

That he was not a good man I have little doubt. Even now, over 25 years after he first came to these shores it takes little to get those who had business with Sonny Boy (Aleck “Rice” Miller) Williamson to spin yarns. He carried a hip flask full of whisky and also a knife. “It was well known that if you fucked with him, he would cut you”, remembers Robbie Robertson of The Band, one of the last musicians to work with him after he went home in 1965. Indeed, on that initial visit to England, on one of the original package tours of American blues artists, he got into a violent skirmish with another blues singer at a London hotel. “But maybe it was all staged for our benefit”, wonders Neil Slaven, who was there at the time. For Sonny Boy was always a master showman. A big man, over six feet tall, the most enduring image of him is the one he adopted on that first European tour: a businessman’s suit hand-tailored in harlequin light and dark grey, leather brief case, bowler hat and folded umbrella. Thus attired, Sonny Boy would lead whichever band was trying to follow him through all manner of hoops and disasters. The Animals might have fared slightly better than The Yardbirds but, listening to the ragged tapes, one can only feel sympathy for the enthusiastic confusion of these young, inexperienced white British musicians as “The Grand Vizier of the blues” sends them down the garden path again and again, occasionally pausing long enough to play some quite magnificent harmonica along the way. (For verification check out a transcendent “Lonesome Cabin” recorded at Birmingham Town Hall with The Yardbirds on February 28^th 1964.)

When he returned from his adventures in Europe he made the oft-quoted remark to Robbie Robertson: “Those English kids, they wanna play the blues so bad, and all they do is play the blues so bad.” Obviously his fellow travelling peers and contemporaries had suited him better and it is to Granada Television’s eternal credit that they managed to film some of these visiting blues statesmen for a modest documentary titled “I Hear The Blues” – featuring, among others, Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim as well as Sonny Boy. Backed by Slim and Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Sonny Boy insinuates himself through a lubricious “Keep It To Yourself”. It’s essential viewing: on the final chorus, after some deadpan clowning with the harmonica, Sonny Boy pitches a long high flat 7^th of exquisite aching beauty which falls unexpectedly into a slurred suggestion of a favourite vamp. Meanwhile, his eyes: dead, drunk and defeated. Possibly well past 60 years old (his real birth date has never been established and Sonny Boy would always give a different one to whoever asked), he didn’t have much longer to live. 

In his very last recording sessions, Sonny Boy dispensed with songs altogether. Instead he would just sing about whatever was on his mind as he stood there at the microphone. His playing at the end has been harshly criticised or indulgently dismissed as the work of a master who has lost his power. But for me, his playing on the last Chess session (unreleased at the time) is truly heroic. Be it drunkenness, senility or (as seems most likely) a combination of both, Sonny Boy’s playing here is completely free. The infamous break where he plays the same high-register motif all the way through two choruses is a perfect example of this. Forego form in the blues and all you are left with is feeling. Dissolve your preconceptions about what a blues harmonica solo is supposed to sound like and listen to this playing. Is it not free? Does it not soar?

First time I heard Sonny Boy Williamson I was quite literally floored. Halfway through the album side I was trying to play along. By the end of the side I was lying on the floor. That anybody could rock that hard, that anybody could sound so shifty, lecherous, tricky and sardonic – and simultaneously so vulnerable. And his timing? Good God, this man’s timing was the very devil! His music became an obsession for me and I would need to hear it every day. I cajoled my local library into getting hold of the five-album boxed set containing virtually everything the man had recorded for Chess in the last ten years of his life. I thought this would surely satisfy my addiction. Not a bit of it. Five albums later I still wasn’t satiated, if anything I wanted more. The man was a genius. The power of the harmonica on “Ninety-Nine” was enough to level a high-rise estate. The titanic, elemental depth of his playing on “Trust My Baby”, the lyrics to “Your Funeral And My Trial”, or “Fattening Frogs For Snakes”, or “Unseen Eye” –  all the lyrics, in fact. And there were so many of them, so many great songs: variations on a theme that was old and mean and watchful, wry and world-weary but still lustful, mischievous, full of sly back-handed gallows humour. Then there was “Help Me”. I’d heard innumerable bands thrash through that time honoured “Green Onions” riff but this was something else entirely. Could it be that the song wasn’t emotional blackmail after all? Not mere bluster but a heartfelt request from an old man with a drink problem to his long-suffering wife? And there again, that harmonica, how did he do that? The way it sounds like an organ, the way it hovers and chops. How did he manage to juggle those lazy offbeat lines with that husky, intimately intoned straight-beat vocal – and deliver both with such effortless panache? No doubt, Sonny Boy was a true master. 

Totally immersed, I devoured the long and learned essay by Neil Slaven that accompanied the box set. From it I inferred the implicit notion that the Chess recordings are all very fine, no doubt, but perhaps inferior to Sonny Boy’s earlier recordings made for the small Jackson, Mississippi based Trumpet label run by Sonny Boy’s first manager, Lillian McMurray. I flipped. You mean there’s better stuff than this? Impossible. Still, I made it down to Collets in Charing Cross Road and parted with an inordinate sum of money for a copy of “King Biscuit Time” – a real American blues import on the wonderful Arhoolie label containing the Trumpet sessions. Sonny Boy was a little younger then and he sounds more enthusiastic, even eager to please. The harmonica is unamplified which limits Sonny Boy’s dynamic range and forces him to over-use his hand-cupping wah-wah effect. Despite their R’n’B and jump band pedigrees, the accompanying musicians sound more down-home log-cabin country shack than the impeccable Chicago Chess house band but, so what? They’re not as good. They make Sonny Boy work too hard. I’m glad I got the album, it’s a great blues record, but for prime time Sonny Boy I’ll stick with the Chess Box. 

Take, for example, “Checking Up On My Baby”. The first eight beats alone contain enough natural magic to galvanize any halfway sensate person’s stomach muscles. Sonny Boy’s studio band had been recording together for nearly five years when the track was cut in April of 1960 and the intuitive empathy between the musicians was at an absolute peak. Sonny Boy’s unique method of leaning on a beat – playing fractionally behind it or ahead of it, as he saw fit – is here brought to such a degree of rhythmic subtlety that even the very first beat of his harmonica intro is staggered. Anticipating this, drummer Fred Below responds by barnstorming in with the first drumbeat placed dead centre, thereby creating an overwhelmingly compulsive swing. Robert Jr Lockwood and Luther Tucker’s guitars, Otis Spann’s piano and Willie Dixon’s bass all tumble in behind the drums, each with their own interlocking groove and, way over the top, Sonny Boy plays only his meanest, toughest harmonica – his sparse lines cutting through the rhythmic undergrowth like a master Samurai swordsman in a temper. At the end of the first chorus, the rhythm guitar comes to a dead stop on a bruised and battered 7^th, and starts up again immediately as Sonny Boy sings:

“I’m checkin’ up on my baby,

Find out what she puttin’ down”

his voice nothing but a growl of guttural discontent and paranoid suspicion. The rhythmic tension is rigidly maintained for two choruses before the drummer allows some relief by playing broken triplets across the turnaround. Robert Jr Lockwood’s lead guitar echoes, anticipates and complements Sonny Boy’s harmonica solo – itself a flawless model of razor-edge economy, every note honed to such a fine point. 

“Well I wouldn’t call home,

No I wouldn’t even write,

I caught me a plane,

Flew back the same night,

Checkin’ up on my baby…”

By the time “Checkin’ On My Baby” was recorded, Sonny Boy was old. He was a near toothless, drunken, belligerent old black man from Mississippi who had been a restless, poverty stricken vagabond virtually the whole of his life. He had also been one of the greatest American artists of the 20^th century. Original and truthful in his art always, what did he have to prove? Nothing. You can hear his attitude perfectly expressed in the famous studio argument with Leonard Chess over the title of “Little Village”:

L.C: What’s the name of this?

S.B.W: Little Village. Little Village, motherfucker! Little Village!

L.C: There ain’t a motherfucking thing there in the song about a village, you son of a bitch!

S.B.W: Well a small town.

L.C: I know what a village is!

S.B.W: Well all right, Goddammit! I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it, son of a bitch, you can name it “Yo Mammy” if you wanna.

Towards the end, despite the odd flashes of brilliance, it was obvious that, on a day-to-day level at least, Sonny Boy had lost it. But there are one or two engrossing curios from the end period. One is an album recorded in Copenhagen in 1963 and originally issued on Storyville. For a lot of this record Sonny Boy plays entirely unaccompanied, as he would have done on any number of street corners throughout the South in his youth, and it is fascinating to follow his eccentric, unpredictable train of musical thought. On that same Danish trip we can hear him, drunk and ebullient, jamming with Rahsaan Roland Kirk in a little club in Copenhagen, calling himself “Big Skol” and plucking a wild blues out of thin air recorded for posterity as “The Monkey Thing”. Then nearly two years later in 1965 there is the well-intentioned but fairly disastrous attempt by Giorgio Gomelsky (The Yardbirds manager at the time) to team Sonny Boy up with a jazz rhythm section – with a very young Jimmy Page along for the ride. It’s a hopeless failure but it’s worth a chuckle to hear these slick jazzers from the heart of Swinging London trying to follow what was left of Sonny Boy. He died within weeks of the session and he went home specifically for the purpose. “We’re like elephants”, he is reported to have said, “we knows”. His last recording was made for the King Biscuit Flour radio show he had played regularly for many years prior to his European adventures. The story goes that none of his friends and contemporaries believed he had ever really been away. 

So what is left of Sonny Boy Williamson? A name that he stole from a younger musician (who had been murdered in 1947. Sonny Boy didn’t use the name while John Lee Williamson was alive)? An image of a bowler hat and a goatee beard – a tall, stooping, suspicious black man dressed in a harlequin business suit like a psychedelic stockbroker? What’s left, of course, are the recordings. They get cheaper and cheaper every year but don’t let that fool you. Cuts like “Born Blind”, “Like Wolf”, “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide” may keep getting reissued and reissued on cheaper and cheaper foreign pirate cd’s but that doesn’t for one moment stop them from being the stuff. But far better to get the Chess Box, with all the out-takes and the hilariously obscene studio backchat. Get it, play it loud and play it all. Walk into walls smiling. Sonny Boy lives.

It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but in the strict context of the then-emerging British blues boom, Free were a punk band, and “Tons Of Sobs” – their debut album from 1968 – was very much a punk album. In terms of their youth and inexperience (their average age was 18) it was patently ridiculous for them to be making such heavy weather of a song like James Oden’s “Goin’ Down Slow”, and this one track more than any other reveals their initial shortcomings and gives a strong flavour of what they must have been like in the clubs in the early days. Paul Kossoff, that master of understatement, over-playing as guiltily as any teenager possessed of a Gibson Les Paul and a fistful of licks learned off John Mayall albums. Andy Fraser, the purveyor of pared-to-the-bone funk bass, sidestepping semitones with no regard for context or subtlety. Simon Kirke, soon to be the tightest drummer in British rock, bashing away, and, of course, Paul Rodgers, trousers tighter than prudence would suggest health permit, bellowing about having had his fun and “would you please write my mother, tell her the shape I’m in”… 

It’s good for a laugh, but it’s strictly a period piece, and there’s very little on that debut album that stands up to closer scrutiny. “I’m A Mover” and “The Hunter” were firm live favourites and consequently are much better on the live album. “Moonshine” and “Worry” are almost worthy of Black Sabbath, but not really. “Walk In My Shadow” is macho teenage trash. Again, good for a laugh. It’s only “Over The Green Hills”, the acoustic tune that bookends the album, that has much to say about what Free would become.  

It all came together for the second album, “Free” (1969). Right from the start, you can hear that this is a much better band altogether. “I’ll Be Creepin’” stands to this day as one of the very best bits of funk ever played by a rock band. It’s tough, tight and lubricious as hell – Fraser’s bass line is a hook in itself and Kossoff’s solo is a model of controlled violence: the way it snarls off at the end, that’s how it’s done. On the other hand, “Mourning Sad Morning” is a keening acoustic lament of the most melancholy hue, featuring Chris Wood of Traffic playing his African styled flute. Exquisite sadness with a mutant crossbred Irish-Hebrew melody. Then there’s “Lying In The Sunshine”: a lazy soul ballad singing the joys of…laziness. The sheer poise of it, absurdly classy for a bunch of kids hardly out of their teens. How did they get so good? By playing all the time, that’s how. And KNOWING they were good.  

By the time they got to their third album, “Fire And Water” (1970), they were the tightest band in the UK. Tighter than The Stones, The Who, and way tighter than Led Zeppelin. Tighter, not better. The songs were still mostly crap but, my God, they played them like they were gold dust. Some of them were good: “Don’t Say You Love Me” continues in the soul ballad style and extends it to quite outclass something like, say, The Stones “I Got The Blues” – the Stax tribute off “Sticky Fingers”. Paul Rodgers was obviously a better singer than Mick Jagger but usually he “over-souled” everything – a bit like his obvious idol, Otis Redding. On this track, however, he unfolds the story like a master, singing his best lyrics to date about a love affair gone on too long. Then there was “All Right Now”, and that was it. “All Right Now” is so famous, so well known, so well established in the Classic Rock genre that it’s almost impossible to hear it in context. For Free, it meant the end of one kind of career and the beginning of another. Try to listen to it objectively and what have you got? A basic guitar riff that’s incredibly difficult to play exactly right, a throwaway lyric about a casual pick-up, a wonderfully subtle arrangement that’s also perfectly simple, a guitar solo to die for (which Kossoff did, effectively) – sounds like classic rock’n’roll and that’s what it is: Eddie Cochran updated for the 70s and for all time.

But poor old Free: they couldn’t handle success. At first it all looked good. The gig fees went up dramatically, they got taken seriously by the business, they got a decent budget for the next album, but it all went horribly wrong and they split within a year. The problems were obvious on “Highway” (1971). In many ways, this was their best album yet. The songs were so much better, the production was crisp and warm, the playing as good as it ever was – but there were no more “All Right Nows”. The closest to it, the wonderful “Stealer”, was put out as a single and bombed. The album was panned in the press as being too soft and introspective. Free were perceived as a heavy rock band (this was a period in which heavy rock had become commercial for the first time), what were they doing messing about with beautiful heartbroken ballads like “Soon I Will Be Gone”? Or plaintive Van Morrison-esque stories like “Bodie”? They began to lose heart. More worryingly, Paul Kossoff began to use heroin.

Kossoff deserves an essay to himself but suffice it to say that, in the opinion of this writer, he played with more heart than any other British guitarist bar Peter Green. Both of them London Jews. Both of them casualties. Interesting. Peter Green burned out and spent 25 years of his life in and out of mental institutions. Kossoff died at the age of 25. The comparison with Green is germane also because Kossoff idolised him (with good reason) and couldn’t accept it when people compared them. There’s a heart-breaking story about when Free supported Blind Faith in one of their only UK concerts. After Free had done their set, Eric Clapton appeared in their dressing room to ask Paul Kossoff how he achieved his finger tremolo. Kossoff was completely thrown; thought Clapton was mocking him. But, no, not a bit of it, Eric was completely genuine – he has always been a real musician, whatever else one may say of him. But Kossoff had massive self-esteem problems, and they led him – as they have led so many others – to heroin.  

The rest of the band looked on in horror as he fell apart. Although he wasn’t the youngest, he was the baby of the group. He had come from a wealthy show-business background, he was closeted, shy, hypersensitive, timid, belying his lion’s mane hair and wildly emotional on-stage demeanour. Free was all he had in his life that he cared about. When they split, he became a full-time junkie. In an attempt to rescue him, his former colleagues decided to put the band back together. Their commercial standing was still good – they had scored another minor hit with the beautiful “My Brother Jake” where Andy Fraser reveals himself as at least as good a pop piano player as Paul McCartney – and Island were happy to bankroll them. They produced another minor hit in “Little Bit Of Love”, which despite featuring another superb bassline, suggested the vacuousness that would later damn Bad Company, but the accompanying album “Free At Last” was an absolute dog. In those days, bands had artistic integrity and Free knew it was all over. They split again. But then, just as before, Kossoff hit the smack again and this time the poison took.

Prematurely aged by his mid-20s, Paul Rodgers wrote the most achingly sad lyric to “Wishing Well” – dedicated to Kossoff – and recorded it, along with the various other songs that make up “Heartbreaker” – the final album put out under Free’s name in 1973. Simon Kirke was still there, just about, but Andy Fraser had gone. Tetsu Yamauchi stood in for him on bass,  Rabbit added keyboards and the guitar duties were handled by various sessioneers who were on hand if Koss was absent or too fucked-up to play. It’s an aptly named album: much overlooked by fans at the time who were busy mourning the band and worrying about Koss. There is fine, bittersweet music on the record and if it isn’t as good as Free at their best, it’s still way better than anyone could have expected – and miles better than “Free At Last”.

Somewhere in between Free’s split-ups and re-forms, Island had put out a sampler of live tracks recorded at various colleges on tour in the UK in happier days, “Free LIVE!” It was a feast for the fans featuring Kossoff on blistering form throughout and Fraser’s epic bass efforts on “Mr Big”. Today it stands as proof of just how great they really were on a good night.  Also, tucked away at the end, was “Get Where I Belong” – a graceful waltz inexplicably left off “Highway” – with its most plaintive lyric of dislocation and confusion. It’s almost a prayer. How far Paul Rodgers had come from the arrogant strutting of “Walk In My Shadow”.

The massive 5 cd box set, “Songs Of Yesterday”, should be approached with great caution. What it doesn’t say on the box is that (apart from a cd’s worth of unreleased live stuff, some of which is excellent) it is entirely comprised of alternate takes, oddities, jams and odd bits of session work undertaken by various members. In other words, it is strictly for the fan who has everything. For those who have yet to acquaint themselves, start with “Fire And Water” and take it from there. 

It’s funny: Free were one of those bands whose reputation suffered the most with the advent of punk. I remember selling all my Free albums in 1977 in case someone should find them in my collection – nestling with The Ramones or The Damned. Then I had to buy them all back in the 80s!

These days I have only the highest regard for them. It’s incredible how young they were, and how in those days, being that young and that proficient didn’t seem all that remarkable. How times have changed. It would be impossible for a band like Free to make it now, but the sound they made pioneered so much of what rock became – without ever really sounding like a straight-up rock band at all. All their songs were slow: “All Right Now” is by far the fastest thing they ever did. They worked a slow burn like no others, they were subtle, and they took their time. That’s why their records still sound good. If you’ve not heard them, check ‘em out. If you have, listen again.

The Parker/ Benedetti box set has held a talismanic fascination for me since I first discovered its existence. Dean Benedetti was the man who followed Charlie Parker around taping his saxophone solos – and only his solos – for a short period in the mid-to-late 1940s. It was an act of obsessional devotion. Benedetti had thrown away a promising career as a professional saxophonist because he had heard Parker one night and realised that this was the way in which the alto saxophone was meant to be played – and that his calling lay in becoming Parker’s self-appointed amanuensis: his unpaid, un-hired secretary. What Benedetti had immediately recognised was that Charlie Parker was a bona-fide genius, and that nobody was documenting his performances. He set to work.

I knew about all this from reading Ross Russell’s biography of Parker, “Bird Lives”. I also knew that the hardline according to the “Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD” was that Russell was more than a little inclined to exaggerate, or even directly falsify. But I also learned from this Penguin guide that the Benedetti archive really existed and was available to buy: a bunch of jazz obsessives running a company in Connecticut called Mosaic records specialized in complete sets of recordings of noted artists at specific stages of their careers. These were only available by mail order or from specialist shops. Lovingly restored. lavishly annotated, cripplingly expensive – the Benedetti set was 7 cd’s long and cost well over £100. And what did this thing actually consist of? Literally hundreds of (in some cases very) short recordings of snippets of performances that had taken place in small clubs in California over half a century ago. These recordings were allegedly of exceptionally low fidelity. How could they not be, considering how they were made? The legend according to Russell was that Benedetti had used an ex-Nazi wire recorder. Imagine that! Little reels of wire! But no, the sober report in the Penguin guide gives this the lie: in reality Benedetti’s tool had been a disc-cutting machine. Which is even better! Imagine this guy, Benedetti, sitting in a locked toilet cubicle (Ross Russell again, unrefuted so I take it as gospel) monitoring the levels on a weird, ancient 78rpm disc-cutter. Imagine the fragility of those discs! How  precious they were! For what was on those discs was nothing less than the sound of Bird in flight: casually giving proof of his extraordinary gifts night after night, scattering unprecedented streams of notes to the four winds without a thought for posterity. Only Dean, huddled over his machine in the gloom of a stinking nightclub toilet cubicle, only Dean could provide documentary evidence to the sceptics and the faithful alike. Dean Benedetti: the magician’s stenographer.

Myself, I’d avoided Parker’s music for years, scared of his reputation. I knew that if I got stuck in then I would probably become obsessed; and I was already obsessed with so much music, even then the library was out of control. Then, one day, inevitably, it happened: in all innocence my flatmate loaned me a copy of the Dial Masters. “Listen to this”, he said, “it’s great stuff, you might really like it”.  I could tell just by looking at the cover that it was dangerous. I avoided listening to it for weeks, not until my flatmate started asking for it back did I finally give in. And, yes, it was “The Famous Alto Break” that did it for me. This was the unaccompanied four bar bridge to “A Night In Tunisia” – famous amongst Bird-fanciers as a particularly choice bit of Parker. When I heard it I was dumbstruck, as so many have been before and as I’m sure so many will be in the future. I played it over and over. The dam duly broke: I’d find myself singing bebop riffs at bus stops. Vainly, I would try to play them on the guitar, not knowing where to start. I made tapes for bewildered friends. I was hooked. Charlie Parker had got me. 

I’ll try not to bore you with the details but as the years went by I found that  I had gradually got hold of all the Dial sessions, and all the Savoy sessions, with all the out-takes, some 11 lp’s (I made sure to get ‘em on vinyl) representing about four years of Parker’s 11 year recording career (not including juvenilia). They all sounded roughly the same but they were all totally different: musical snowflakes. And like snowflakes they were all so exquisitely detailed, so intricate and – when Bird was flying – so effortlessly perfect. As well as these I had got some of the Verve sessions –  which I didn’t like so much, Parker having been placed by Norman Granz into some highly incongruous commercial settings – plus some live sessions from the later period: the ‘Massey Hall’ concert, Birdland, Royal Roost radio broadcasts etc. I was helped in this by my friend Stan Britt, veteran jazz critic and true believer in Bird from way back. There was no doubt in my mind, any more than there was in Stan’s, any more than there can have been in Benedetti’s, that Parker was among the most extraordinary musicians of the 20^th century.  

His technical innovations, marvellous though they were, were not his alone. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Thelonious Monk to name but three were all working towards the same goal at the same time. And certainly Lester Young, who was Parker’s idol, had suggested in the mid to late 30s that he could have invented bebop there and then if it hadn’t seemed like so much hard work. No, what set Parker aside and above his contemporaries were his perfectly rounded phrases, his graceful ease and swing; at even the most punishing tempos he always sounded like he had time to spare. He always played melodies, even if they were sometimes rather oblique, and he had that extremely unusual gift of being able to make time do his bidding. It’s something that all great virtuosos have: it’s one of their distinguishing features, and it’s very difficult to describe  – even in technical language. He himself described what he did as being:  “just music. It’s just playing clean and looking for the pretty notes.”  

Nevertheless, Bird was well aware of his gifts and was notorious for playing tricks on his rhythm sections. He was fond of shaving off beats from bars by playing irregular phrase lengths that sounded regular by virtue of their melodic symmetry – perhaps a result of listening to Stravinsky and Berg, as Parker liked to do – and thereby throwing bass players and pianists into terrified confusion as they found themselves approaching the end of a 12 or 32 bar measure apparently several beats behind. “Don’t follow Bird!” Max Roach would bellow from behind his drums, as Parker would chuckle a phrase to finish the measure in exactly the right place – leaving the hapless accompanists in rhythmic limbo. (“I used to want to quit every night” – Miles Davis)

Of course, we have the records to prove all this, one only has to listen to them. But Dean Benedetti didn’t have a box set of cd’s to listen to. Only his precious home-made 78’s. He had seen what needed to be done and he had had the wherewithal and savvy to get it down anyway that he knew how. I admired him so much for what he had done. How the hipsters must have laughed up their sleeves at him: (“Hey, there goes Dean, that wiggy cat with his big box under his arm.”  “Uh, like, Dean got thrown out of the club by the union rep!” “No way!” “Dig that kinda shit!”) And what about the nights when his discs got broken, or spoiled, or lost, or when his microphone didn’t work, or when he would get interrupted and ejected by some philistine authority figure who had no conception of how important his work was. And where was his reward? Who defrayed Dean’s (not inconsiderable) expenses? What was his payment? Only the recordings themselves: the truth of how completely it was possible for a man to master the alto saxophone.

I saw the Benedetti box set in Honest Jon’s in Portobello Road. It was up on the wall behind the counter. I didn’t even ask to see it. I couldn’t begin to afford it. Anyway, it was madness wasn’t it? Seven cd’s of crackly lo-fi saxophone solos, all out of context. What kind of maniac would listen to such a thing? I sighed openly in the shop. I knew the answer to this question: Me. I knew also that some of the solos had been transcribed in manuscript. Imagine how painstakingly difficult that must have been. How much time and patience that would have taken. My own reading would be too rusty to get the full benefit from such scholarship, but wouldn’t it be something to just follow the line? It was driving me nuts. I had a record collector’s mental cold shower and bought something else instead. I never saw the box set again and I assumed that the very limited edition that Mosaic had pressed had been exhausted. All the nutters who were going to buy it had bought it – all except the ones who couldn’t afford it and who cares about them, right? 

Some years later, I was on tour in Europe playing bass with a celebrated pseudo-Arabic diva. We were in Helsinki and Hami the drummer told me he was going to check out this record shop he’d been told about. I tagged along for something to do before soundcheck. We took a tram down the road, saw the shop, hopped off, walked in. Hami went to look at World Music cd’s and I immersed myself in jazz. And there it was. At around £120 in Finnish money. I looked at it properly for the first time. It was everything I expected. The essays were long, the pictures superb, the transcriptions and annotations all present and correct. Oh God, oh God…

I tentatively showed it to Hami. He was tickled. Casually, but not without a knowing smile, he suggested I come back the next day and buy it with the money I was to make from the evening’s show. “You won’t regret it”, he said. Torture. As a panacea I bought two very cheap Parker albums – one of which I already had, albeit in a knackered copy, the other being some radio session with Dizzy from 1951. Nice, as it turned out: an insanely fast “Anthropology” which hangs together by magic, also a tough “Blue’n’Boogie”. But I digress. I came back the next day with the money in my hand and, do you know what, folks? I couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t. I sat there for what must have been an hour reading the booklet. It was fascinating, totally absorbing stuff. Serious discography is a kind of strange modern science but with roots stretching back to the kind of work  that the master librarians in the monasteries must have done in medieval times, or even earlier. Was it not they who were responsible for recording the culture for posterity? Likewise the compilers and producers of the Benedetti box. In it, they warmly praised Benedetti’s accuracy and scholarship: “He was one of us. And a good one”, wrote the editor at one point.  And I felt like weeping. Whose work is it that I was hankering after: Parker’s or Benedetti’s? I thought of Benedetti dying a painful, premature death, not long after Parker’s, of all that work, all the trouble he took. For what? So that fifty or so years later, a few hundred similarly minded devotees scattered all over the world should know the truths that Benedetti discovered about Parker’s music? I put the box down. It seemed too easy to just buy it, with this funny money. I put it back. Left the shop. Sat in a café. Had a coffee. Cigarette. Stared into space. 

I realised that it’s enough just to know that it exists. I’m a working musician. The time it would take to listen to it, study it, absorb it, is time that Parker would have spent practising. It’s a hard discipline. But it’s simple and truthful. You serve the music. Parker himself once famously observed: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” And this remark has been quoted endlessly by romantic apologists for Parker’s abominable, dysfunctional lifestyle. But I think he meant something else quite different from drugs, booze, whores and homelessness, he meant that you must serve the music. That’s what he and Benedetti had in common, what they shared, what they did together. The artist and his faithful Boswell.

(this is a fictional work of imagination – with apologies to “The Troggs Tapes”)

Ritchie’s partner at the time: Ritchie, there’s Jimmy Page on the phone for you.

Ritchie: Oh yeah? (takes telephone) Alright, Jimmy? What’s goin’ on?

Jimmy: Sutch. Fucking Sutch is what’s goin’ on.

Ritchie: What about him?

Jimmy: You remember that drunk jam session last year?

Ritchie: Sort of.

Jimmy: He’s only gone and put it out, hasn’t he? With your name and mine all over the cover, on MY fucking label!

Ritchie: WHAT??? He can’t do that!

Jimmy: He’s done it. I never even heard it and it’s OUT!

Ritchie: How the fuck? Who did…? (long pause) What’s Grant say?

Jimmy: I haven’t told him yet. I’m too scared to call him. 

Ritchie: You don’t think Grant did it? As a joke? 

Jimmy: I kinda hope he did. That would mean he wouldn’t want to kill people. 

Ritchie: Shit… Have you ‘eard it? 

Jimmy: Yeah.

Ritchie: And?

Jimmy: You don’t wanna hear it.

Ritchie: (exploding) Fucking hell! Sutch! What a cunt!

Jimmy: It’s the worst, Ritchie. The worst record. There are no songs. There’s nothing there. Just that nutter ranting like a maniac about flashing lights and God knows what.

Ritchie: I wanna hear it now! Have you got a copy?

Jimmy: I gave it to Bonzo. HE loves it…

Ritchie: Tell you what. I’ll call the office. Get someone to pick one up from HMV’s. 

Jimmy: Get two and bring me one, would ya? I’m too embarrassed to ask for one. 

Ritchie: Oh, it’s alright for me then?

Jimmy: Oh bollocks, you know what I mean.

Ritchie: (sarcastic) Yeah, I know what you mean. (pause) Who else is on it? I can’t even remember.

Jimmy: I can’t remember either! You, me, Bonzo, Jonesy was there but he kept his head down. Mitch, I think, Noel bleedin’ Redding.

Ritchie: hahaha! Oh God… What are we going to do?

Jimmy: It’s out! It’s gone. It’s out there. Major distribution. It’s going to be in the charts. Don’t even talk about money. Sutch got hold of the tapes and got someone to get Atlantic to put it out off the back of Zeppelin. We can get lawyers on it, I s’pose. Try and get it pulled.

Ritchie: Is it gonna make Zeppelin look bad? haha! I think I like it! 

Jimmy: And you, you bastard. Purple fans are gonna buy it too. 

Ritchie: Purple fans are smarter than Zeppelin fans.

Jimmy: Fuck off. Get the records and come round and listen to it with me. I’ve got some nice wine. What you up to tonight?

Ritchie: (sarcastic) I’m at your service, Jimmy.

Jimmy: hahah! (pause) Sutch, eh? Mad cunt. 

Ritchie: Did you ever tour with him?

Jimmy: Nah.

Ritchie: I did. Loads. I could tell you stuff about Sutch…

Jimmy: Come round, man. Really. 

Ritchie: Alright. I’ll see you later.

Jimmy: Later.

(click)

Let us start with the big picture. We have been here for maybe 150,000 to 200,000 years. Not really very long in terms of natural history. Nature came up with a biped mammal – a sort of offshoot of the chimpanzee family. Actually there were three or four kinds but apparently Homo Sapiens quickly wiped out the other ones. Anyway, that’s us. We can’t run very fast, we can’t climb very well, we can’t swim very well, we get cold quite easily. We’re sitting ducks as far as any serious predator is concerned so Nature thought she would give us a fighting chance by equipping us with a cerebral cortex, or *something* in our brains that enables us to make predictions from our actions, make judgements, assess situations, you know, THINK. We figured out how to make fire, build dams etc etc etc. We are an aggressive species. We kill for fun – which is quite unusual in Nature. Until relatively recently, we tended to try and cooperate with Nature (I’m giving Nature a capital N and a female sense out of respect because that’s how I feel) but in more recent times a desire to compete with or even demolish Nature has held sway. This has led to our current problems with Climate Change, environmental damage etc which looks increasingly likely to lead to a major catastrophe within the next fifty to a hundred years or so. There will be bitter wars fought over high ground and drinking water and it will not be a fun time to be alive. The comforting idea that we, as a species, will come to our senses and avert this impending disaster has all but run out of time. Bummer…

OK. That isn’t really all that debatable – although of course many people would debate it. Let’s get into a conspiracy theory or two. Nature has a way of fighting back. She is not docile or passive. She doesn’t care about us. We are a bit of a failed experiment. We have done a lot of very impressive things with that cerebral cortex but, overall, we have made a terrible mess on the carpet. We are wasteful and ungrateful. We need to go. With this in mind, Nature comes up with a few solutions: Covid just being the latest in a long line. (For myself, I think Covid was a result of human error, but I won’t pursue that one here.) I think she wants to get rid of us. People are having a lot less sex than they were even fifty years ago, but I don’t really want to go down that road either. After all, in some parts of the world there are probably massive birth rates. But there are too many of us. My old friend Richard posited a good conspiracy theory at least 25 years ago. He suggested that the wealthy want to kill off the poor so that they cease using up valuable commodities: space, water, breathable air etc. I think he was on to something. I would love to eavesdrop on the Bildeberg group meetings, for example. (For anyone who doesn’t know about Bildeberg, look them up.) Obesity is an interesting example. Watch a few minutes of the “Woodstock” movie which was filmed in August 1969. There you have close on half a million American youths. How many of them are obese? Virtually none. If you gathered a similar sample of half a million American youths now, what would be the picture? Understand, this is an observation, not a judgement. There are specific political reasons for this. Richard Nixon knew that he would have to win the votes of the farming lobby to get elected. To this end, he offered substantial tax breaks for massive corn production. I don’t remember the details but I have been told the story. The upshot was an enormous surplus of corn in the US economy. Then some bright spark discovered that corn syrup could be used as a sugar substitute. Suddenly it was everywhere in processed food. And there are vast swathes of the United States where processed food is the only food available. Trouble is, corn syrup is very hard for the human metabolism to break down. It just sits there. And you get really fat. Heart attacks, diabetes, strokes etc. Premature death. But guess what? The wealthy can afford decent food. Of course they can. (Apologies if I have got any of these details wrong but you get my point). Another aspect of this is the lack of education surrounding what used to be called Domestic Science. People don’t know how to cook food any more. We are not taught how to cook food at school any more. We are not taught how to cultivate vegetables, or basic animal husbandry. Yes I know, you don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car. You don’t need to know what a pizza is before you defrost a frozen pizza and eat it. But still… There are reasons for this too. They mostly boil down to: 

CAPITALISM! Da da!! Were you wondering when I was going to use the C word? Capitalism is a relatively modern phenomenon, more or less dating back to the Industrial Revolution but MAMMON WORSHIP has been around for a very long time. (Anyone unfamiliar with Mammon as a god or a concept, please look him up.) This is one of my favourite hobby horses, so…Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Mammon is a real god – at least as real as Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha or Krishna or Yahweh. Mammon looks at all these other gods and realises that their fundamental problem is that their adherents have to *profess* themselves to be adherents. Imagine if instead, your worshippers could worship you without even realising that that is what they are doing. This is where Mammon really scores. So many people worship Mammon without realising it. They base their entire lives around this worship, as peoples of the past based their entire lives around the worship of their particular gods. I’m not talking about working to earn a living. I’m talking about what drives a person who works, say, in a merchant bank or an insurance company. Who isn’t necessarily a millionaire but who earns a very good living working for someone who is. Why do they do it? After all their material needs are satisfied they create more material needs. Give a man a hundred million and all you do is create a frustrated billionaire. The idea is that money will make you happy. Now I know there are people who will say that anyone who cannot see how to make their money make them happy is just unimaginative. I think that’s true, but I think that the very business of making all that money *makes* them unimaginative. They simply don’t have time to see beyond the next bonus. What’s it all for? Accumulate, stockpile, put the money where it’s going to be *safe*, invest, build – and to what end? So your kids never have to work? So they can blow it all? Is that all there is? (So let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.) But there’s nothing really new about this. So what *has* changed? Property prices, obviously. Used to be a middle class professional working in a big city could buy a place to live near to their office relatively easily. That’s no longer true. Political corruption has allowed international gangsters to park their money in property which has driven up prices at the top which has had a knock-on effect. Similarly, the very wealthy have been allowed to get much wealthier with similar effect. That which society values has changed. An ability to make money from gambling with other people’s money is probably the most highly rewarded talent but the parasitic greed and selfishness that underpins this is reflected out in all manner of ways from the phenomenon of famous-for-being-famous ‘celebrity culture’ to ludicrously overpaid footballers etc etc etc. Children grow up seeing that being selfish pays. You have to have a very strong moral compass indeed to see that hard work and generosity of spirit are their own rewards. 

So let’s go back to the period immediately following the Second World War. We beat the nazis! Wah hey! Fantastic. But at a terrible cost. We needed to rebuild. We invited citizens of the “Commonwealth” to come over here and help us do it (then, when they had worked all their lives for minimum wage and were too old and exhausted to fight, we shat on them and threw them out, but hey…). The very wealthy paid up to 90% tax. 90% Think about it. Supertax they called it. But you know what? Eton and Harrow and all the other schools for the rich were not short of students, the Rolls Royce and Bentley showroom in Berkeley Square did good business, three foreign holidays a year, domestic staff, country estates etc etc etc. The rich maintained their lifestyles despite the high level of taxation and meanwhile, the NHS was founded and funded, libraries, public utilities, education – all of this was paid for with tax. Politicians went into politics for altruistic reasons. They really wanted to serve the public, the general good. There was a sense of Public Duty. Laughable, right? I daresay I am romanticising but can you imagine any of this happening now? What went wrong? Much as I love to blame Maggie Thatcher for everything I think in this case it’s justified. Thatcher, with her misguided devotion to the economic theories of Hayek and Friedman, ushered in a new philosophy. She moved the goal posts. Ironically, she had a very deeply rooted sense of Public Duty. It’s just that it was informed by an ideology of cruelty and spite and deep hatred for the working classes. By destroying working class communities and throwing literally millions of people on to the dole, she created an uneducated underclass of disaffected people who knew they had been robbed but lacked the wherewithal to see how it had happened. Their culture, their pride, their social context was destroyed as The Market that Thatcher worshipped dictated that their jobs be sent overseas to places where slavery and near-slavery were not illegal. This was a terrible crime, the ramifications of which are still playing out and the damage it caused will not be repaired with a smartphone and a Netflix subscription. Politicians became bought and sold by corporate interests, as in the American model of lobbyists. They no longer served the public in anything but cosmetic ways. From being a manufacturing nation, we became a service industry and a bespoke money laundering service. The fundamental emphasis of education changed. Instead of knowledge being perceived as worth pursuing for its own sake, knowledge became worthwhile only if it had a commercial application. Could you make money with it? If not, why bother? This is truly the poison in the well of Mammon worship.

But let’s talk about music – which I actually do know something about. When I was at school in the 1970s I got four years worth of free guitar lessons, two years worth of free flute lessons, a few piano lessons – all by putting my hand up in class and saying that I wanted them. This would be impossible now. Only those children whose parents can afford to pay get instrumental tuition. Of course, I had to learn what I was taught. I didn’t have a choice. I was taught Classical – or, to put it another way, music from the Western Tradition of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart etc. The great dead white males. I had to learn to read music and I had to play these pieces whether I liked them or not. “But, sir” I would say to my guitar teacher (Merlyn Bloor, wherever you are, I thank you), “I wanna play like Jimi Hendrix, sir.” “If you want to play like that,” he replied, “you have to teach yourself.” That was good advice. I knew I was going to be a musician from the age of 12. I didn’t know what kind of musician I was going to be, or how I was going to make a living from it. Nobody taught me. I had to figure it out for myself (or fail to figure it out). I think this was a better system than the one I eventually wound up teaching in. Like a great many musicians I had to start teaching to eke out my living. To my surprise, I found that I enjoyed it. I got a job teaching once a week at Highgate School, a medium posh public (private) school in North London. One day in the mid-90s, one of my students asked me if I could teach him “Anarchy In The UK” by the Sex Pistols. No problem. The utter absurdity of my position struck me even as I wrote out a rudimentary chord chart. I hardly need to dot the I’s and cross the T’s. It was better for me to learn Bach and Beethoven through gritted teeth than to be spoon-fed Sex Pistols songs by an impecunious musician working on Musicians’ Union teaching rates. I had to go out and find the music I wanted to play. And I did. (“Sometimes it takes a long time to learn how to play like yourself” – Miles Davis) The popular music of a culture reflects the culture itself. I came along at the end of a period where music had been the primary mode of communication between young people. It had been profoundly important. The falling off of the significance of music is too big a subject for now but I would like to make one musicological observation. The popular music I grew up with was, to a large extent, based on a template of I – IV – V – the three primary chords. Subjectively, this has a questing quality. It wants to know what is going to happen next. What is over the next hill? Round the next corner? Let’s move forward and find out. Popular music of more recent times (especially in America) is founded on a template of I – V – vi – IV – the “No Woman, No Cry” or “Let It Be” changes. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this but it is essentially comforting. It wants its mummy to hold it and tell it that everything’s going to be alright. (Musicology itself provides an interesting example of how the culture of education has changed. When I was doing Music ‘O’ level in the 1970s a basic understanding of Equal Temperament was required. This is the nuts and bolts of why Western music sounds the way it does. Why harmony is possible etc. Sometime in the last twenty years or so I noticed it had disappeared off the syllabus. I asked the head of department at the school I was teaching at why this was so. “Too complicated”, he smiled.) Meanwhile, kids in the music departments of private schools can learn pretty much anything they want. It’s all up for grabs. Like the entire history of recorded music, it’s all just a couple of clicks away. But what are they encouraged to become proficient in? Ensemble playing? Listening to each other? No. “Music Tech”. In other words, how to use computers to make music. How to quantise musical elements so that they can be manipulated in conveniently uniform blocks while constructing a recording. Recording a performance, with all the attendant skills in microphone placement, understanding acoustic spatial awareness – “too complicated.” This isn’t just dumbing down or laziness. In my opinion, this is a deliberate attempt to dehumanise music (quite literally removing human elements) because humans making music together can lead to independent thought, spiritual satisfaction, the promulgation of subversive notions. Yes, I know. Aren’t I the paranoid one? Put it this way, I don’t hear any music being made that carries a hint of rebellion. Nowhere. Nohow. When I was a teenager, musicians could rehearse in squats whilst claiming the dole. This amounted to state patronage. Not any more. Squatting has been made illegal  and signing on the dole is much more difficult than it used to be. Thus, music is effectively closed off to the poor. Think about that one for a bit. What would you rather? Genesis, or The Beatles? Mumford & Sons, or The Specials? 

Meanwhile, back at all that STUFF that got outsourced. The manufacture of endless amounts of plastic goods, the mountains of cheapness. You can have whatever you want. Just a couple of clicks away. Give Amazon access to your money online and wait for it to turn up. And when you don’t want it any more, just throw it away. Primark for cheap clothes. Who cares who made it? Under what conditions. Just be grateful it wasn’t you. McDonalds and Greggs for cheap food. Stick it in your mouth and chew. Be glad it’s there. Consume, kid, and don’t ask awkward questions. My partner and I were wondering what had happened to teenage rebellion. To political activism. It got indentured, indebted. Tony Blair did away with the free university education that he and his generation had received and replaced it with student loans. Thus, young people in their early 20s are placed into debt to a level that would have been unthinkable when I was a youth. In order to pay these debts off, they must get a “good” job, they must devote themselves to servitude. In the late 1960s and early 70s, who were the most troublesome members of society? Who caused all the fuss? Shouted the loudest? Yep, students. Well, we sure shut them up, didn’t we? Keep their nose to the grindstone paying for their dumbed down education until well into middle age. That’ll work. But what about everybody else? Busy looking at their mobile phones. Glued to the little screens. So between student debt and the internet, all political activism is effectively stifled. Politicians are bought and sold. The police are openly corrupt. Scientists are at the mercy of their corporate sponsors. The ruling class are flagrantly above the law. Music and the arts in general are to a large extent toothless and the average citizens concentration span shrinks and shrinks. It’s grim. So… Gather ye rosebuds where ye may. Take pleasure where you find it and grin and bear the rest? Pretty much. So what of the cashless society? The surveillance state? The “Covid Passport”? The Metaverse? Opt out at your peril. Soon, you will not be able to purchase basic goods and services with cash. You will not be able to travel unless you can prove you have submitted to a syringe full of an experimental substance, the long term effects of which are unknown.

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

So that was written by some anonymous Jewish guy a couple of thousand years ago. It’s in the book of Revelations. Laugh if you want. But already in places in Scandinavia there are subcutaneous chips placed in people’s hands that enable them access to their work place. It’s happening, baby. Watch this space. 

“It can’t happen here” – Frank Zappa

Interesting that in the 1950s it was the ‘jocks’ who were looked up to as models. Strong men, muscular. The Charles Atlas ideal. Now it is the ‘nerds’ who have inherited the human world. The clever ones, the ones who design the computer programs. Mark Zuckerberg. Mark would have us live our lives in his ‘metaverse’. He wants us there, where he can see us, where he can see any threat coming before it reaches him. Mark misses his mummy. He wishes he had not been thrown off the boobie so soon, that he had had more pretty girls wanting to sleep with him when he was young. This is his world. It is an irony not lost on me that I am using the platform he devised to publish this diatribe – if anyone cares. I say, reject the metaverse. Pay in cash. Grow your own vegetables or if you cannot do that, learn to cook your own food. Play music made by human beings, love, laugh and look up from your screens. 

That’ll do for now. 

In Spring of 1993 I answered a ‘Musicians Wanted’ advert in the Melody Maker. What had caught my eye was Blues-meets-Rap, which I thought was an intriguing notion. It was just around the time when jazz-meets-rap was getting underway with Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest and the Digable Planets and, of course, US3 and Guru’s Jazzmatazz. Blues-meets-Rap seemed like a great idea to me. 

The project was called RAW and was the brainchild of a Northern Soul buff named Andy Phillips. Andy was a little older, had been a saxophonist around the Two Tone scene in the early 80s but had never made it. He figured this was his last chance and he was giving it all he’d got. He had found a singer named Dominic Martinez who could do a reasonable imitation of an old blues singer, and a young girl singer named Kirsty Willcocks who had an excellent r’n’b voice in the prevailing style. What Andy was doing was actually way ahead of its time: he would sample and loop bits of old blues records and weave original songs around them. Little Axe and Beck had a lot of success doing something similar but Andy was first. My job as guitarist was to emulate the guitar parts on the samples and weave in and out of them. It was fun and it was new. We rehearsed at Andy’s flat in North London and we began to get an act together. Simultaneously with this, Jools Holland and the noted producer Laurie Latham had decided to start a record label, Beautiful Records, and Andy had got wind of this and convinced them to give us some studio time at Jools Holland’s home studio in Greenwich. 

Not long after this, a documentary was aired on the BBC named “Rhythms Of The World”, featuring the late John Walters presenting a young, London based harmonica player named Errol Linton. The thrust of the programme was that young Errol was The Real Thing: a bona fide black blues musician playing and singing his own blues right here and now in London – and that this was (and is) noteworthy. It is to Walters great credit that he could, as he put it, “still tell butter from margarine”, and that he recognised that Errol was not just a talented blues copyist but an artist in his own right.  

Andy watched this programme and immediately called the BBC and requested that he be put in touch with this Errol Linton. Andy had decided that Errol would be perfect for RAW. Thus it was that, one day in 1993, I walked up the stairs to Andy’s flat and heard what I thought was a Sonny Boy Williamson record coming out loud from behind the door. I was surprised because I was obsessed with Sonny Boy Williamson at the time and thought I had heard all his records. Open the door and there was Errol sitting in the middle of the room, playing harmonica. He was shy, he still is, but we cautiously shook hands. By the end of the afternoon’s session I thought: I want to play with this guy, and I think he might have been thinking something similar because he asked me if I wanted to play a gig with him and his band at the Dublin Castle in Camden Town. “Yes”, I said. Most definitely.  

I went round to Errol’s home in Brixton to go over some material with him, but really we just jammed. I remember we played a version of Miles Davis’s “All Blues” that I still have on an old cassette tape somewhere. Come the gig, I turned up to meet the rhythm section on the bandstand. It was chaos. We had a jazz-funk bass guitarist named John and a heavy rock drummer named Junior, and Errol and myself. Errol would say something like: “This one’s in G”, and count off. We would try and join in but almost every number more or less fell apart. Some of them took longer than others to do so. When they did, Errol would play an absolutely blinding unaccompanied harmonica solo, and the three of us would try and creep back in as best we could until it fell apart again. The audience seemed to like it, however, and Errol seemed completely unfazed by the chaos onstage. I wish I had a tape of it. At the end of it, Errol gave me about £20 and I went home. 

What happened to RAW? We recorded what I thought was a blinding 4 track EP. Errol played on two of the tracks and I played on all four. It sounded fabulous, the cover art was cool, it had a nice sleeve note from Jools Holland who played piano on one track, and then… Nothing. It never came out. Beautiful Records as a projected record label was quietly shelved, Jools went back to his unspeakably lucrative career and, presumably, Laurie Latham went back to high class freelance record producing. Our calls were not returned. It was a damn shame.

Reading between the lines it seems there was a conflict of interest in that the label manager was also Laurie Latham’s personal manager, and that any work Latham did for Beautiful, being speculative, was time spent NOT doing work that made a living for him and his manager. Also, a rift had developed between the two singers in the band. Dominic started suffering paranoid delusions, probably as a result of smoking too much skunk – and I daresay the old music business lags figured he wasn’t worth the hassle. I don’t blame them. He wasn’t. But they should have done something with what was left. There was a lot of talent left on the shelf. Hey-ho. That’s showbiz.