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Posts from the ‘Rock music’ Category

Mar 27

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‘A Night for Neil’

Kokomo at Bush Hall

Neil Hubbard’s guitar was a thread that ran through British rock in the late ’60s and throughout the subsequent decades as a member of Bluesology, Wynder K. Frog, Joe Cocker’s Grease Band, Juicy Lucy, Kokomo and others, and as a hired gun all the way from Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita via Alvin Lee and Robert Palmer to Roxy Music’s Avalon and Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love”. He could play a storming solo, as Paul Carrack reminded the audience at Bush Hall last night, but he really excelled as a rhythm player: a master of the groove. Carrack recalled the remark of B. B. King, who met Hubbard on the sessions for his Deuces Wild album in 1997, that “you could set your watch by him.”

Last night’s sold-out event was a fundraiser for the charity researching the disease — Lewy body dementia — from which Hubbard is suffering, and which kept him away from this celebration of his career. The all-star bill opened with Hamish Stuart, once of the Average White Band, putting out some admirably funky stuff with a fine version of Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” and an arrangement of “Pick Up the Pieces” concocted for AWB’s appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival by their great propducer/arranger, Arif Mardin, and featuring the non-nonsense tenor saxophone of Jim Hunt.

Next came Kokomo, their five original members — singer Frankie Collins, singer-pianist Tony O’Malley, saxophonist Mel Collins, guitarist Jim Mullen and percussionist Jody Linscott — supplemented by those who have replaced the fallen along the way, including the singers Charlotte Churchman and Helena May Harrison and bass guitarist Jennifer Maidman. This was a classic Kokomo mini-set, including Quincy Jones’s “Stuff Like That”, Stevie Wonder’s “So What the Fuss”, the band original “Third Time Around” and Bobby Womack’s “I Can Understand It”.

Attention turned to the screen behind the musicians, where we were shown a little film of Hubbard in the home where he is currently living, playing his Gibson ES-355 with a young friend on an acoustic guitar. As Neil’s golden retriever lay at his feet, he strummed the intro to Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” — which the live band picked up and flew with.

Carrack was next, with “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You”, “Stand By Me” and, of course, Ace’s immortal “How Long”, pub rock’s finest hour, its chorus sung back at him by the audience. By this point, the love in the room was overflowing.

Finally the stage was cleared for Roxy Music — two original members, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera, joined by Chris Spedding and Chester Kamen on guitars, Guy Fletcher on keys, Guy Pratt on bass guitar, Andy Newmark on drums and Jody Linscott, the night’s Most Valuable Player, plus the Kokomo singers, with Dionne Collins replacing Churchman. Kamen sang “Love Is the Drug”, Louise Marshall arrived to deliver “Avalon” and Mackay’s soprano saxophone was featured on a sultry instrumental that I think might have been “Tara”.

Then came a real coup de théâtre as we watched back-projected film of a Roxy concert from Fréjus in 1982, with Hubbard featured alongside Ferry, doing “My Only Love”, synched up (via a click track in Newmark’s headphones, I’d guess) to the live band. Two people who were unable to be with us on the night were nevertheless making their contribution. The technical manipulation worked beautifully.

To close, almost the entire company crowded on to the stage to go back almost to where Neil’s story began, with Joe Cocker’s gospellised version of “With a Little Help from My Friends”, the lead vocal bravely taken by O’Malley. The perfect end to a night that felt like a meeting of old friends, an evocation of old glories and an affirmation of… well, something or other. Something good, anyway.

Roxy Music 1982/2026 at Bush Hall

Mar 25

12 Comments

The other Fab Four

Between 1965 and 1968, the Lovin’ Spoonful were the nearest America came to producing a Beatles of their very own. Their string of hits took in irresistibly winsome folk-rock jingle-jangle (“Do You Believe in Magic”, “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind”, “Younger Girl”, “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”), wistful sunshine pop (“Daydream”, “Rain on the Roof”), a brilliant homage to then-unfashionable country pickers (“Nashville Cats”), and a widescreen urban anthem that lives with the finest and most ambitious 45s of the mid-’60s (“Summer in the City”).

Where the Beatles came from skiffle, the Spoonful took their initial inspiration from jug bands. But they shared an inquisitive spirit and a breadth of range that made their early albums, released on the newly formed Kama Sutra label, full of pleasant surprises. Unlike the Beatles, at that stage they only had one main songwriter: John Sebastian, who was always rather more than the tie-dyed cartoon figure of Woodstock legend. It was Sebastian who laced his songs with lines such as “It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll”, “You didn’t have to be so nice / I would have liked you anyway” and “The more I see, the more I see there is to see”, and could come up with the entire brilliant lyric of “Nashville Cats”.

They also had an eccentric in the ranks: Zal Yanovsky, the Canadian lead guitarist with the goofy Ringo-type presence who blotted his copybook in 1966 after he and Steve Boone, the bass guitarist, had been busted for marijuana possession. Threatened with deportation, he co-operated with the police. The fact that it happened in San Francisco, headquarters of the counter-culture, only deepened the disfavour into which the group as a whole suddenly fell with the influential alternative press. They were from New York, too, which probably didn’t help.

For a while they pressed ahead with soundtracks to two movies by young directors, Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now, the latter including two classics in Sebastian’s swooning “Darling Be Home Soon” and the title song, with its interludes of Michel Legrand-style orchestration. And there was a brilliant third album, Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful, on which Joe Butler, the drummer, stepped forward to take the lead vocal on a power-pop classic called “Full Measure”, which ended up on the B-side of “Nashville Cats”. But Yanovsky soon left, to be replaced by Jerry Yester, formerly of the Modern Folk Quartet, an old associate who had actually played piano on theie first hit, “Do You Believe in Magic”.

With Yester on board, they recorded a fourth album, called Everything Playing, that sank without trace on its release at the end of 1967 despite being crammed with absolute gems, including Sebastian’s “She Is Still a Mystery”, “Six O’Clock”, “Younger Generation” and “Money”, Boone’s lovely “Forever”, Butler’s poignant “Old Folks”, Sebastian and Yester’s “Close Your Eyes” and, most impressive of all, Butler and Yester’s “Only Pretty, What a Pity”. If Hums was their Rubber Soul, this was their Revolver. But it had been a year since their last album, the bad smell from the bust lingered, and soon Sebastian was gone, claiming that his experience of the group had been “two glorious years and a tedious one.”

All that remained was Yanovsky’s wacky solo album, titled Alive and Well in Argentina and full of psychedelic whimsy, and a strange effort called Revelation Revolution ’69 by “the Lovin’ Spoonful featuring Joe Butler”, which included a powerful anti-war sound collage called “War Games” and a gorgeously lush version of “Me About You”, written by Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon (of “Happy Together” fame), which outdoes other treatments of the ballad by the Turtles, Jackie DeShannon, the Mojo Men, the Walker Brothers and others.

All of this and more — including the four tracks they recorded as a kind of audition tape for Elektra in 1965, and which got released the following year alongside tracks by Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, Al Kooper and Tom Rush on an album titled What’s Shakin’ — can be found in a new seven-CD box set called What a Day for a Daydream: The Complete Recordings 1965-69. Not the least of the set’s merits is a thorough sleeve note by Mojo‘s Lois Wilson. If you’ve forgotten about the Lovin’ Spoonful, or never really got beyond the hits, I can’t recommend it too highly.

* The Lovin’ Spoonful’s What a Day for a Daydream box set is on Strawberry Records. The photo of the original group — (from left) Yanovsky, Butler, Sebastian and Boone — was taken in 1965 by Henry Diltz.

Mar 18

8 Comments

Ready for his close-up

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, a biopic released in 2022, was something I felt I could do without. What turned up during the research process, however, was something else: a cache of film shot in Las Vegas and elsewhere soon after Presley’s comeback in 1969. Hitherto unseen, it consisted of unedited footage devoted not just to recording his performances but to rehearsal and backstage scenes. Here was Luhrmann’s goldmine, and he spent a couple of years turning it into EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a 97-minute documentary which I saw at the BFI’s IMAX cinema in London this week.

There are things about the film that I’m not so fond of, such as the flash-cut montages that race through various aspects of Elvis’s life amd career: the looks, the screen kisses, and so on. It’s a way of bringing younger audiences up to speed, I suppose, and the 60-images-in-60-seconds approach probably seems perfectly normal to them. I found it a bit trashy — but of course there was something a bit trashy about Elvis, as there is about Luhrmann’s work. Neither of them, one imagines, would be averse to a ride in a gold Cadillac.

More seriously, the film is stuffed with passages that succeed in telling us more about Elvis than we already knew. Where Luhrman’s approach works, against all odds, is in eliding several performances of a single song, from rehearsal to Vegas showroom, creating a single unit of music containing several perspectives. Sounds a bit meretricious? Works beautifully on songs like “Burnin’ Love” (where we appear to be shown the first band rehearsal of Dennis Linde’s composition), Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” and the majestic “How Great Thou Art” (although it does suggest that Elvis’s gospel chops have deteriorated since he made his first gospel album, His Hand in Mine, in 1960).

But to see him working with his rhythm section and singers is to understand how much he loved music. You can’t sing Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” the way he does without real commitment to the material. Or the quite fantastic medley of “Little Sister” and “Get Back”. You hate medleys? Try this one, which brings the best out of the guitarist James Burton and the drummer Ronnie Tutt — making me all the more angry that the closing credits don’t list any of the members of the rhythm section or the backing singers, all of whom are clearly having a ball working with the King. I’d heard that medley before, but to see it performed, with such skill and enthusiasm, is something special.

A couple of moments caught me cold. One is when the director isolates Elvis murmuring “All my trials… soon be over,” from the traditional song Mickey Newbury incorporated into his “American Trilogy”. Another is a snatch of Presley singing as if to himself: “I feel my light come shining / From the west down to the east / Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.” He repeats it, and then, as an aside, says the name “Dylan”. I felt I’d heard it before, and I had: it’s taken from a week of all- night sessions with his band in 1971, released in 2021 on a four-CD set called Back in Nashville.

It makes you wish he’d recorded it properly, and then it makes you think about all the great songs he should have recorded, in the best possible circumstances. Instead, as he admits in contemporaneous interview footage, he wasted the ’60s making terrible Hollywood movies at the insistence of his manager, Colonel Parker, who lurks around the fringes of this documentary in a way that tells you very clearly what Luhrmann thinks of him. Elvis also expresses regret and puzzlement at not having appeared in places like Europe and Japan — anywhere outside the USA, in fact — and we know who was to blame for that.

One or two other things: the shots of the various audiences are fascinating, particularly one wide-angle view from the back of the stage at the Las Vegas International showroom. And there’s a glimpse of Elvis in a car with the Memphis Mafia, giving you a hint of their special kind of camaraderie.

In all of this footage, which I guess is from 1970-71, Elvis is in good shape — a little fuller in the face, but not in the figure. He’s lithe and agile. In good spirits, too: always ready for a goofy laugh, or to change a lyric during rehearsals to include something mildly filthy. I know that such a documentary is the director’s construct, telling the story he wants you to know. But I really did come out of it feeling warmer about Elvis the human being, and even more regretful about the opportunities he missed.

Jan 16

22 Comments

‘Sue me if I play it wrong…’**

Within a very short time last night, it was apparent that my pal Martin Colyer and I were probably the only people in a packed Ronnie Scott’s who were seeing the night’s featured attraction for the first time. The enthusiasm aroused by the Royal Scammers’ versions of the Steely Dan repertoire, from the opening “Night by Night” to the closing “Aja”, was so warm and immediate that it could only have come from committed fans.

Fans of the compositions of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, of course, but also of the 14-piece band formed by the twin Stacey brothers, Paul on lead guitar and Jeremy on drums, with two clear intentions: to pay homage to the source and to have a lot of fun in the process. It was the way every member of the band seemed to buy into those ideas that made the whole thing fly, for the musicians and the audience alike.

Let’s name them all now, these people charged with summoning the spirits not only of Fagen and Becker but of their cadre of great session musicians: Andy Caine (vocals, rhythm guitar), Sumudu Jayatilaka (backing vocals, keyboard, tambourine), Louise Marshall, Bryan Chambers (backing vocals), Dominic Glover (trumpet), Trevor Mires (trombone), Andy Ross (tenor saxophone), Jim Hunt (tenor and baritone saxophones), Dave Arch, Gary Sanctuary (keyboards), Robin Mullarkey (bass guitar) and Pete Eckford (percussion). I was amused to see that they lined up across the stage at Ronnie’s in exactly the way the actual Steely Dan did/do, as seen on the cover of Northeast Corridor, their 2021 live album.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m allergic to tributes and recreations, but there are exceptions. And sometimes a literal recreation is the only way to go. I mean, are you going to come up with anything better than Wayne Shorter’s astonishing tenor improvisation on “Aja”? Jim Hunt played it note for note, and it was beautiful. Ditto Pete Christlieb’s tenor solo on “Deacon Blues”, replicated by Andy Ross. As much as the precision, it depends on the intention and the emotion with which it’s done.

Interestingly, when the “real” Steely Dan play “Aja” now, Walt Weiskopf, their excellent tenorist, is allowed free rein to make up his own solo in the space once occupied by Shorter. But I don’t think that’s what required from the Royal Scammers. The first improvised solo I ever learnt off by heart was by the cornetist Bobby Hackett on Glenn Miller’s 1941 Bluebird recording of “String of Pearls”; if I went to see a modern Miller tribute band today and the cornetist didn’t reproduce Hackett’s improvisation note for note, I’d feel cheated. On the other hand, when the American band known as Mostly Other People Do the Killing saw fit to record an exact replica of Kind of Blue a few years ago, as a post-modern gesture, it felt like an insult — to the original and its creators, to the listener, and to the spirit of the music itself.

The spirit of Steely Dan was certainly alive and flourishing at Ronnie Scott’s last night, in a setting of wonderful musicianship. Andy Caine, facing the challenge of assuming Fagen’s voice, took two or three songs to warm up but then sang brilliantly, giving full value to two of my favourite couplets: “I cried when I wrote this song / Sue me if I play it wrong”** (“Deacon Blues”) and “Chinese music always sets me free / Angular banjos sound good to me” (“Aja”).

There spirited renderings of early songs like “Reelin’ in the Years” and “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”, less obvious ones like “Night by Night” and “Pretzel Logic”, and ones with sudden fiendish modulations like “Green Earrings”. Wherever the original ended in a studio fadeout, the Staceys devised an interesting and wholly fitting coda.

There were also four great songs from Gaucho: “Babylon Sisters”, the always strangely spinetingling “Hey Nineteen”, “Time Out of Mind” and the title track, which actually improved on the original by subtly dialling up the mariachi inflection in the horns. The three backing singers delivered the chorus bit of “Gaucho” with such thrilling intensity that I noticed Martin spontaneously applauding not just on the first iteration but the reprise: “Who is the gaucho, amigo? / Why is he standing in your spangled leather poncho / And your elevator shoes? / Bodacious cowboys such as your friend will never be welcome here / High in the Custerdome.”

It occurred to me that tributes and recreations work where the original template is mostly established, i.e. composed. Ellington’s music can continue to be performed successfully because, although he wrote for his soloists, the settings were fixed. It’s the same with Fagen and Becker. You can play around quite happily with their wonderfully inventive, literate, cryptic and infernally catchy songs (as Chris Ingham does with his quintet) but you can also decide that playing them as written is the best homage. Which is what the Royal Scammers do, quite brilliantly.

* The Royal Scammers play two shows tonight and tomorrow and one on Sunday at Ronnie Scott’s. All are sold out. The photograph was taken last night by Tatiana Gorilovsky.

** This is not the correct lyric (see Comments). But it’s how I heard it 48 years ago and it’s how I hear it still. Yes, I’m wrong, but — sorry, Walt & Don — I prefer my version.

Dec 22

20 Comments

The man with the blue guitars

The thing about Chris Rea — who has just died, aged 74 — was that he didn’t fit anywhere, except with the people who loved his music. And sometimes they didn’t fit him, which caused a few problems. The people who bought “On the Beach” and “Driving Home for Christmas” made him rich, but their expectations could be frustrating. This was a man who also recorded pieces called “Green Shirt Blues (for George Russell)” and “Take the Mingus Train”, which seemed to show where his heart lay. Occasionally an envelope would arrive with a CD of rough mixes and things he’d been trying out in his studio; the last piece he sent me was called “Giverny and the Trenches”, an eight-minute instrumental mini-suite containing multitudes, including free-jazz saxophones.

But that wasn’t the only only place his heart lay. Occasionally he’d email about something or other. The exchanges were usually brief but always interesting. One was about the R&B singer Little Johnny Taylor, whose “Part Time Love” was a favourite with the sort of mods we both were in the ’60s. He must have been to see Taylor live, possibly at Newcastle’s Club A Go Go. “How good was he!… I could smell the sweat dripping on my mohair suit (14inch single vent).”

Another time, I sent him a link to James Jamerson’s isolated bass part on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, on YouTube. “Fucking wow!” he replied, and said he’d just been listening to the Temptations. “The Temps have blown me away again, even after all these years. Re-reading Berry Gordy’s book… just to be there!  I must be going bonkers, got caught in the kitchen doing dance moves to ‘Get Ready’. Struggling to be bothered with what’s happening now. Only God seems to know the value of Motown.”

Chris had been a blues hound and a northern soul boy, and he never lost it, even when he seemed to be driving straight down the middle of the road. He was a proper musician, and he loved working with other proper musicians, like the keyboardist Max Middleton and the drummer Martin Ditcham, long-time associates. I doubt that this country has produced many better slide guitarists, too, but he was never flashy.

He wrote great pop songs, the sort that mean something to people, that speak to their emotions and become part of their lives: “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)”, “Josephine”, “Stainsby Girls”, “Let’s Dance”. There was always a bit more to them than just a pop song. He once told me that he’d been paid to come up with the first few lines of Hot Chocolate’s “It Started With a Kiss” — no credit, just a lot of money. Somebody else could finish it and get the publishing royalties. It’s a great song, thanks to those opening lines.

He loved to paint — cars, mountains, his collection of guitars. The Hofner violin bass above is one of his, used on the cover of an album called Hofner Blue Notes, a sequence of a dozen pieces for solo bass guitar and rhythm section. He released it in 2003 on JazzeeBlue, the label he set up in a fit of exasperation with the limits imposed by major record companies on artists who didn’t want to be forced into boxes. Artists like him.

That same year, also on JazzeeBlue, he released an album called Blue Street (Five Guitars), a beautiful series of tone poems inspired by, probably among other things, his love of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue period. It contains a truncated version of a piece he once sent me in unfinished form, originally with the working title “Going to A Go Go”, in which he used the riff from the Miracles 1965 hit of that name to evoke the cherished memories of those happy days and in a second, slower section, to ask himself questions about what had happened to him since: “And your life is rolling over / A little faster every day / Better stop for a while and think it over / Because you know for sure you lost your way / Does what’s around you really matter / Is there something left undone /Now the truth has got you on the run…” Then he goes back to the original tempo: dancing, as he once put it, down the stony road.

The version on the album doesn’t have the sung part of the first section; maybe copyright problems got in the way. But, as much as all his greatly loved hits, Blue Street (Five Guitars) is a great testament to a man who earned the rewards of success but never quite the recognition he deserved.

The health problems he suffered over the last 25 years were hideous. The last time I saw him, he bought me dinner at a very good Italian restaurant on the Fulham Road. Italian food was another thing he knew a lot about, thanks to his dad, Camillo, who ran a chain of ice-cream parlours in and around Middlesbrough. And now I’m going to play his “Going to A Go Go”, over and over. So glad I knew him; so sad he’s gone.

Dec 19

2 Comments

Antony Price 1945-2025

Of course there was the shock of the music, exquisite to some and befuddling to others. But it was the list of credit on the cover of the first Roxy Music album that really got people going. Concept by Bryan Ferry. Art by Nicholas de Ville. Photography by Karl Stoecker. Clothes, make-up and hair by Antony Price. Something different was going on here.

A lot of it had to do with Antony Price, a Yorkshire-born former Royal College of Art student who got together with Bryan Ferry to devise the group’s look. Price died this week, aged 80, having made a significant contribution to the way the culture around the music evolved in the 1970s. Price made the ruffled satin swimsuit in which Kari-Ann Moller posed on the wraparound gatefold cover image of that debut album, the strapless sheath dress that Amanda Lear wore on the front of For Your Pleasure, and so on all the way through Roxy’s eight studio albums.

Here’s Phil Manzanera, talking to me a few years ago about joining the band in 1972. “I remember getting on the 137 bus from Clapham to go to the photo session for the first album and of course I had no idea about style. My mum sewed some diamante on to a white shirt and I turned up at the session and Antony takes one look at me and says, ‘No, no, no!’ He hands me the bug-eye glasses. ‘Stick these on! And here’s a leather jacket!’ Job done. Fantastic. Antony was a bloody genius.”

Here’s how Ferry remembered putting that first cover together: “I think it was after the recording. Either we were still making, it, or just about finished. I remember calling Antony from a red phone box, I think in the King’s Road, which makes sense because I used to hang around EG (Management)’s offices. I was living in Battersea with Andy Mackay. I remember Antony saying, in his gruff way, ‘I want to hear what it sounds like!’ So I guess I went round to see him.

“Antony had this photographer friend who he’d already done a couple of things with, called Karl Stoecker, married to Errol Flynn’s daughter – a very handsome man, a real ladies’ man. We went to his studio and did this picture. Antony and I talked about it… (he) had this girl called Kari-Ann who he thought was ideal – I wanted a woman, dressed by him. It turned out to be the perfect thing to go with the music.”

What was the cover image saying? “All the ’50s references in the music, late ’50s, early ’60s, were being reflected. It wasn’t that long gone, but it seemed like an age. But although it was a cheesecake kind of thing, it was a bit more knowing. It was all in the details, I think… the make-up, everything, the gold disc – that was a conceit, a cheeky little thing. Yes, it was challenging – and she was looking in a challenging way. It was in the (pre-digital) days when you didn’t know if you had the picture at all. A week later you’d look at the prints. I was so excited.

“Then Andy Mackay found this piece of fabric which we used on the inside cover. Nick de Ville, I got him involved, he was a friend from art college. Finding typefaces and fiddling around with that. Then we liked the idea of the (band) pictures looking like postcards. It was a cottage industry, really. We did a session with Karl Stoecker and Antony, dolling us all up. Eno’s girlfriend made a shirt for him – Carol McNicoll, who was a really brilliant artist working in ceramics – she also did his outfits, the feather things later on. Great, like theatre costumes. Andy’s things were a bit more raunchy. Wendy Dagworthy did Phil’s outfit. And Paul was dressed like a caveman – his sound was quite primitive.”

In 1974, for the cover of Another Time, Another Place, Ferry’s second solo album, Antony made two identical white dinner jackets — single-breasted, shawl-collared — for the cover shoot, taken by Eric Boman against a swimming pool, with elegant people in the background. That summer I was going to an Island Records party in the big studio at Basing Street and needed something to wear. Bryan lent me one of those jackets. Nothing has ever felt quite like it.

Nov 24

1 Comment

Twang. Thump. Crash. More twang.

Finding Ways is the name of the drummer/composer Seb Rochford’s new band. It’s also the title of their debut album, which they played at the Cockpit Theatre in north-west London last night, as part of the Jazz in the Round series. It was one of the events featured on the closing night of the 2025 EFG London Jazz Festival, and I couldn’t imagine a happier way of ending the 10-day programme.

Rochford has made some intriguing choices in his career, but probably none more surprising than this. Finding Ways is a guitar-instrumental band: three guitarists, to be precise, plus bass guitar and drums. I don’t think I’ve seen such a line-up live since an early incarnation of Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green, Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer back In 1968. Or at least not one so memorable.

Last night’s guitarists were David Preston, Tara Cunningham and Matt Hurley, joined by Anders Christensen on bass guitar. One thing that stuck out straight away was the absence of pedal boards or other effects. No wah-wahs, no phasing, no tremolo arms. This, apparently, was at Rochford’s insistence. So what we heard was three versions of the sort of sound you made when you got your first electric guitar, hit an E major chord and then looked for a way to make the strings twang. A sound with innocence intact. And an interesting approach to apply to three very sophisticated players.

So what was the result? Surf music in space, maybe. The Ventures or Dick Dale and the Del-Tones with Derek Bailey or Sonny Sharrock sitting in. Rochford’s tunes for this line-up are sometimes based on simple two-bar chord modules reminiscent of the twangtastic “Walk, Don’t Run” or “Misirlou” (and occasionally finding beguiling elaborations of the format, as on the soaring “People Say Stuff, Don’t Be Disheartened”). Also springing to mind: the free-form guitar conversations of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir in the Grateful Dead and of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in Television: “Dark Star” or “Marquee Moon” but with different perspectives.

It was great to see the band in this environment, arranged in a circle, the musicians locked into each other, watching for cues, tidying up small errors but letting rough edges show as they exploited the spaces left for spontaneity within the structures. Furiously loud in some places (driven by Rochford’s brutal energy), it was surprisingly lyrical in others; I don’t think I’ve ever heard three electric guitars played as softly as in the filigreed three-way conversation between Cunningham, Hurley and Preston that formed the delightfully unexpected coda to “Community”, which had started out as a reggae piece.

In this intimate setting, the musicians’ very visible sharing of their pleasure extended to the audience and was washed back in return. They were having fun, and so were we.

* Finding Ways is out now on Edition Records. The photos of Sebastian Rochford and Tara Cunningham at the Cockpit were taken by Steven Cropper and are used by kind permission.

Oct 16

7 Comments

At the London Palladium

Two poets took the stage at the London Palladium this week. The first, Patti Smith, was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of the epochal album Horses by playing it all the way through with a band including two of her original confrères. The second, Al Stewart, had made it part of his farewell tour, and thus his final appearance in the city where he once shared a flat with the young Paul Simon and had a residency at Bunjie’s, a folk club a shortish walk across Soho from where he was saying his goodbyes.

Smith is 78. Stewart is 80. Horses came out in 1975, the year before Stewart enjoyed his biggest hit with the title track from Year of the Cat. Both drew full houses — Smith on two nights running — and performed with a vigour that reanimated the work of their youth.

We know Smith as a poet who rammed literary and musical forms together to great and lasting effect. Stewart’s success in turning big subjects — the Basque separatist movement, the French Revolution, Operation Barbarossa — into long narrative folk-rock songs reflected a creative use of the early impact of Bob Dylan on his songwriting. But where the enduring glamour of the New York era of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City ensures Smith’s continuing credibility, Stewart’s soft-rock associations have probably restricted his following to his original audience. There was no measurable difference in the enthusiasm that greeted both artists on a celebrated stage.

If the guitarist Lenny Kaye and the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty provided valued historical support for Horses, assisted by Jackson Smith and Tony Shanahan on keyboard and bass guitar, Stewart (and his four-piece band from Chicago, the Empty Pockets, plus the saxophonist/flautist Chase Huna) benefited from the guest presence of his old collaborator Peter White, who added beautiful guitar decoration to “Time Passages”, which he co-wrote, and “On the Border”, and remodelled the rhapsodic piano introduction — including “As Time Goes By” — to “Year of the Cat”.

To be honest, I hadn’t listened to Stewart for decades before last night. I bought the tickets as a treat for my wife, who knew him a little in Bristol folk scene of the late ’60s and remembers once giving him a lift to London. But as thrilled as I was to hear Smith declaiming “Redondo Beach” and “Birdland”, I was just as beguiled by Stewart’s “The Road to Moscow” and “The Dark and the Rolling Sea”.

Today Smith, of course, looks even more like a poet than she did in 1975. Stewart, who lives in Arizona, now resembles someone who might be the secretary of the local bridge club. Good on both of them.

Aug 31

31 Comments

Isle of Wight 1970: The getaway

The problem with the 1970 Isle of Wight festival was how to get out of it. On the morning of Monday, August 31, exactly 55 years ago, something like 600,000 fans were going to be trying to leave the island. In all probability, the queue for the ferry from Ryde to Portsmouth was likely to resemble a less frostbitten version of Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow.

I’d attended the festival with my friend Geoffrey Cannon, then the Guardian‘s rock critic. I was one of three Melody Maker writers on the case; the others were Chris Welch and Michael Watts. Poor Watts, a recent recruit, had been sent to a camping supplies shop on Holborn, around the corner from the office, and given enough money to equip himself with a small tent and a bedroll. His job would be to tell the story from the perspective of the kids up on the hill.

Welch and I would be taking notes in the relatively salubrious area reserved for VIPs and the press in front of the stage, revelling in the experience of seeing Miles Davis play to a crowd of more than half a million with an average age of probably 20. And there was Joni Mitchell, and the Who, and Richie Havens, and John Sebastian, and the rest of an extraordinary bill.

Geoffrey and I both had to be at our respective offices by the Monday lunchtime, and it was he who came up with a brilliant solution. He called the flying school at Portsmouth airport and asked if they had a plane that could pick us up and take us across the Solent.

The flying school could indeed meet his request, and we were invited to report at something like six o’clock in the morning, maybe a bit earlier. After leaving the festival and making it to the nearby Bembridge airfield, we sat in a hut by the grass runway, waiting for our plane to arrive.

We’d been there for a few minutes when a limousine drew up. Out of it stepped Jimi Hendrix, still wearing the flowing multicoloured silks he’d worn on stage only three or four hours earlier, giving a performance that had begun badly but eventually coalesced into something those who heard it would never forget (luckily, the whole set was filmed).

For Jimi, a helicopter was waiting. He climbed in and disappeared into the misty dawn sky. Eighteen days later, after returning to London from gigs in Denmark and West Germany, he was dead.

Shortly after his departure from Bembridge, our single-engined Cessna turned up and off we went. I expect we shared a taxi from Portsmouth to London and put it on expenses, as we did with the cost of the plane ride, which came to nine pounds and six shillings, including landing fees. The bill was made out to Geoffrey. Somehow, I’ve managed to hang on to it for the past five and a half decades.

Aug 21

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Major dudes, minor ninths

The implied flavour of much of the music made by Donald Fagen and the late Walter Becker might be read as that of hard bop as played on the West Coast: laconic, brainy, slyly coded, but also somehow sunlit. By contrast with the jazz musicians they admired, the Steely Dan duo were afforded the sort of time and effort needed to make their records as immaculate as possible, successfully substituting wit and taste for spontaneity. The result, almost airtight in its perfection, would seem to render any attempt at recreation by third parties not just superfluous but doomed from the outset.

There are, nevertheless, several Steely Dan tribute outfits of high repute, existing to satisfy the appetite in particular of those never fortunate enough to hear the original band in person. I haven’t seen any of them, although I was sorry to miss the 14-piece Royal Scammers when they played the 606 Club in Chelsea last year, having heard good reports from reliable sources.

But if tribute bands live are one thing, offering at least a partial guarantee of satisfaction, an album of reinterpretations is a great deal riskier. The British singer and pianist Chris Ingham brings it off with Walter / Donald, his rearrangements of 13 songs performed by a quintet in which he’s joined by the trumpeter Paul Higgs, the saxophonist Harry Greene, the double bassist Geoff Gascoyne and the drummer George Double.

Ingham is a former music journalist (for Mojo, mostly) and author of books on the Beatles, Billie Holiday and others. Now he writes TV soundtracks and leads a band that has also recorded and toured its surveys the music of Hoagy Carmichael, Dudley Moore and Stan Getz. A fine pianist, he has a light, pleasant singing voice, totally lacking in affectation but not in character, wisely avoiding attempts to imitate Fagen’s distinctive sardonic croon. It’s a little like listening to Georgie Fame singing Mose Allison’s songs: a intelligent take, full of the sort of implicit affection and respect which, along with the musicianship involved, make it stand up as a valid adjunct to the originals.

There are some fine moments, many of which bring the latent jazz to the surface. “Your Gold Teeth II” has a lovely two-horn unison intro, a little like a gentler Horace Silver arrangement, and “I Got the News” finds a hint of Monk in the melody’s staccato phrases. The choice of material also veers into less obvious areas, as with “The Last Mall”, a warped blues-with-a-bridge from Everything Must Go, the last Dan album, released in 2003, which has its chords straightened out and is enlivened by the smart addition of the irresistible horn riff from Fagen’s cover of “Ruby Baby”, from The Nightfly. And I think I might even prefer Ingham’s reading of the quietly heartbreaking “Paging Audrey” to that on Becker’s second solo album, Circus Money (2008).

There are fine horn solos throughout, Higgs displaying an almost cornet-like brightness and an adroit use of cup or plunger mute on the brief coda to “Your Gold Teeth II” and the intro and solos on “Haitian Divorce”, while Greene’s tenor has a fluent mobility reminiscent (to me, anyway) of Hank Mobley, excelling on “What a Shame About Me”, a really great song — a John Cheever short story in five verses.

Honestly, if you walked into a club and found yourself listening to this band playing this material, you’d be extremely happy. It might not be a revelation but you’d be hearing wonderful songs carefully turned so as to catch the light from a different angle, in the process drawing out their humanity.

* The Chris Ingham Quintet plays a launch gig for Walter / Donald at the Pizza Express in Soho on September 17. The album is out now on Downhome Records, available from https://www.chrisingham.co.uk/shop

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